AIR FORCE ONE (47)

Directed by: Wolfgang Petersen

Starring: Harrison Ford, Gary Oldman, Glenn Close, Dean Stockwell

The Pitch: When "Air Force One" - the (American) President's private jumbo jet - is hijacked by Russian terrorists with the First Family on board, the Prez evades the bad guys and swings into action.

Theo Sez: Even compared to such a timid, half-hearted departure from genre as THE PEACEMAKER, this must count as a crushingly simplistic movie : its terrorist villain is, as the First Daughter puts it, "a monster", while its heroic President is, shall we say, pretty exceptional. A devoted family man, he's also a Vietnam vet who's flown more helicopter missions than Bill Clinton's had Big Macs ; a model of compassion who'd rather die than abandon his fellow passengers, he's also a no-nonsense hawk who instantly orders punitive action when that pesky Saddam starts acting up ; a visionary who changes American foreign policy to reflect not national interests but "what's morally right", he's also a Regular Guy who likes to kick back with a beer and a game of football ; the highly respected leader of the free world, he's also a red-blooded action hero (true, he saves Central Asia from a catastrophic regression to neo-Stalinism ; but, more importantly, he kicks some serious terrorist butt). It's tempting to call this nonsense a reaction to the (perceived) weakness of the Clinton White House - to say Americans are desperate for an image of a strong leader, however idealised - but in fact this near-abstract, all-things-to-all-men kind of presidency owes everything to the current incumbent's (and his British equivalent, Tony Blair's) transformation of the office into celebrity status : slick, sax-playing, media-conscious, impervious to scandal (which, after all, is no more than what we expect of our celebrities) and, of course, quite irrelevant to what Presidents actually do. As a film it's good-looking and crisply-edited, at least scene by scene (it's about 20 minutes too long as a whole) - in fact, it's probably the most gripping blockbuster of the last couple of years, an unashamedly and once or twice exhilaratingly square movie ; but it's still pretty depressing to think about.