“I hope there’s a good movie on this flight.”

Justin’s rating: I still can’t get over the fact that the poster uses a pull quote that compares this to Speed, Crimson Tide, and Apollo 13. Just throwing all the ’90s hits at this to see if it sticks, eh?

Justin’s review: “Die Hard on a plane” is something that the 1990s seemed bound and determined to crack, for whatever reason. We got, by my count, four of these. There was Wesley Snipes’ Passenger 57, Harrison Ford’s Air Force One, Nic Cage’s Con Air, and today’s headliner, Executive Decision. I’d never actually seen ED (wait, better not abbreviate this one…), only knowing it for the fact that it had a pretty well-known twist early on and that one plane hooks up with another plane in midair.

A cross-Atlantic Oceanic airliner, perhaps the one that eventually ends up on LOST, is hijacked by terrorists and fitted with a nerve gas bomb that’ll kill large swaths of populated areas if detonated. With eight hours to go until the US Air Force blows it out of the sky, a special forces strike team uses a stealth bomber(?) to get on board, find the bomb, and take out the terrorists.

At least, that was the plan before the plan encountered the enemy. For, you see, this movie does what so many other action flicks tried and failed to do: It killed Steven Seagal.

That’s a spoiler, but it’s a pretty minor one considering the age of this film and the fact that while his head is on some of the posters, his name doesn’t arrive before the title. But you know whose does? Kurt Russel. Russel is intentionally downplaying his normally leading action hero self as Dr. Grant (no relation to a certain dinosaur expert), an intelligence analyst who wears — gasp — glasses.

Grant gets a first class seat on the rescue team’s aircraft mostly because Seagal’s Travis is personally peeved at him. But this ends up being fortuitous, as Grant minus glasses equals a fairly capable terrorist hunter. Who would’ve thought? Other than the title billing, that is?

And I, for one, am glad Steve there was given the boot. Steven Seagal has always struck me as a total jerk of a guy who thinks of himself, his martial arts abilities, and his acting far higher than he should. For a movie to kick him to the side in favor of Snake Plisskin is schadenfreude at its finest.

Travis’ death isn’t just there for the shock value; it’s a very effective way of making the audience underestimate Grant in comparison until Grant is thrust into the lead. And even there, he’s working with a whole lot of other people on the plane to avoid the catastrophe, including Halle Berry as a flight attendant and Donald Trump’s former wife as another one.

Executive Decision isn’t trying to posture or be cool, electing instead to be a straight-forward and competent thriller in the vein of a Tom Clancy outing. It’s because of this that the “Die Hard” label doesn’t stick that well. This is more of a measured ensemble piece with a lot of stealth and some tense set pieces rather than a lone guy constantly knocking off terrorists while making quips over the radio.

And it’s fine for doing that, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to preferring something genuinely more high octane. The problem with these plane movies is that these are very cramped vehicles with only so many places to hide and crawl around. I think Executive Decision manages to exhaust all possible angles before it’s forced into some actual action.

While the ingress of the commandos with the midair transfer was genuinely great, I became underwhelmed as this two-plus hour movie plodded on. A thought that kept going through my head is that in the hands of a talented editor, this could be recut into a shorter, snappier flick and be much better for it. As it stands, I wasn’t really missing much by letting this sit on the video store wall all those years ago.

Intermission!

• Having Steven Seagal lunge out at you in the night and stab you to death wouldn’t be the best week of your life
• These are the quietest machine guns I’ve ever heard
• These noisy subtitles are really annoying
• What is this, a flashback to a completely different movie?
• Tiny pocket computer!
• OK, even pre-9/11 it’s pretty laughable how many guns and bombs they were able to smuggle aboard this aircraft
• They put “armed Air Marshal” on the flight roster?
• Scrubs’ Dr. Kelso as an army dude
• The docking sequence is pretty cool
• Could these special forces guys break MORE stuff in the room they’re trying to silently breach?
• Hehe little Seagal flying out into the big blue yonder
• “Hope the smell doesn’t give us away.”