TURBULENCE (25)

Directed by: Robert Butler

Starring: Lauren Holly, Ray Liotta, Ben Cross

The Pitch: When an escaped psycho kills or disables everyone aboard a 747, a young air hostess has to land the plane by herself.

Theo Sez: A film that seems to have been greenlighted when the vogue in action movies was for variations on the "DIE HARD formula" (spiced, if possible, with that bogeyman du jour, the serial killer) then hastily rejigged to jump onto the bandwagon for disaster movies. The result, farcically, is a situation where spunky "flight attendant" Holly goes (straight-faced) through the plot of AIRPORT - can she land that big ol' plane all by herself, helped only by those good folks at the Crisis Management Centre? - while the presence of a demented killer just behind her becomes increasingly irrelevant, a mere sub-plot : as the cackling psycho, Liotta is left to prowl the plane while our heroine does her stuff in the cockpit, muttering vaguely psychotic one-liners to himself like the Ghost of Action Movies Past. It's not a terrible movie - the early scenes, when Liotta still seems central to the action, work quite well - but it's broken-backed, a casualty of changing fashions. Inevitably, as things get more incoherent, the real fun isn't in the main plot but on the periphery - in its bloodthirsty, line-'em-up-against-a-wall attitude to criminal justice, or perhaps in the wealth of small implausibilities. How can the Crisis Centre put Liotta's calls on the speaker if they're being made to a cop's private mobile phone? How can they interrupt Holly if she's holding her radio switch to "SPEAK" mode? Can a plane really fly upside-down?