User Comments: Date: 27 October 2002
Summary: Unremitting
Let me see if I've got this right. At one point -- at just ONE point --
there is an untutored bloodied flight attendant in a brassiere trying to fly
a jumbo jet over Los Angeles during a level six (out of six) thunderstorm so
she can land it at LAX, while behind her a cackling maniac who has just
murdered everyone else on board and wants to crash the plane into a densely
populated area has just disabled the auto pilot with a mountain-climbing axe
and is now hacking his way through the floor of the flight deck so he can
rape and murder the flight attendant at the controls.
Every moment is like this. It's as if a committee had sat around a table
drinking cafe latte after cafe latte until, on this major caffeine binge,
they started brainstorming on all the possible things that could go wrong,
or could threaten to go wrong, while a couple of convicts were being
transported by U. S. Marshalls on an airplane. "Number One: THUNDERSTORM,"
one of them writes on a blackboard. "Number Two!" another yells out, "the
airplane brushes a rooftop in L.A. and picks up a truck in its landing gear
so it can't put down!" "What are you, NUTS?" replies the guy at the board.
"That's not number two, that's number twenty-seven." And so it goes. By
the numbers.
It makes one nostalgic for the 1970s when these kinds of movies were just
getting started and depended on plot, character, and atmosphere a bit more.
Remember "Jaws"? What this movie is like, is what "Jaws" would have been
like if it had opened with a shot of "Bruce's" head surging out of the water
towards the camera, mouth agape, and the remaining two hours were taken up
with the shark chomping on, or trying to chomp on, everything in sight.
We'd never get to know the sherrif or his family, or any of the other
characters, except in the most one-dimensional way. (The guy in the black T
shirt is the sherrif. The guy with the glasses is some kind of scientist.
Etc.) It wasn't so long ago that they knew how to do these things with a
bit of panache, relying less on strobe lightning and electronic thunder and
more on suspense. "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" is as unpretentious
as this and yet is light years easier to watch because it's so much more
interesting to know something about the people involved, something more than
that they have destructible physical bodies. Going back even farther in
filmic history, I'm beginning to weep with a sense of loss, going back even
farther, imagine how "King Kong" would have turned out if, instead of Kong
not showing up until the movie was half over, the entire movie had Kong
trashing the ship's crew and then all of New York City -- during a
thunderstorm. There isn't a moment's pause in "Turbulence." It snaps from
crisis to crisis so quickly and with such little logic that it makes "The
Taking of Pelham One Two Three" look like a French philosophical treatise.
By comparison, "Jaws" is the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Let me comment on the acting. Well -- actually, I can't, because there is
none. I think I liked Ben Cross's part the best, though. He plays a
British pilot in another airliner who coaches the flight attendant once in a
while. His role never requires him to leave his seat.
Are you down in the dumps? Are you obssessing over a lost love? Did you
invest in Lucent Technologies? In other words, do you want your mind
benumbed for about an hour and a half, so thoroughly that it takes you a
while to answer the question, "What is the name of the planet you're on?"
Then this is your movie.
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