Rough Air: Danger on Flight 534

**SPOILERS**Eric Roberts in one of his rare good-guy roles as 1st officer Mike Hogan is very good as a suspended pilot who's given a second chance to redeem himself under the most dangerous and trying of circumstances.

Waiting for a Trans-Atlantic flight back to New York in London Mike is spotted by the airport manager of AJA airline, Mikes former employer, Arc Davis, Andrew Gillis, and asked if he could come on board as 1st officer since the plane, flight 534, is already two hours late and it's co-pilot isn't showing up. Mike is on administrated leave for crash landing a passenger plane at Boston's Logan Airport when he was supposed to fly the plane to it's original distention. what the board of inquiry wasn't told was that the plane was short on fuel and would have crashed, if Mike kept it airborne, killing everyone where by crash-landing the aircraft he saved all on board. Given a second chance Mike later runs into the same cut & save policies from AJA that caused him to lose his license to fly.

With the planes captain Jack Brooks ,Kevin Jumbinville,not wanting to wait any longer and with a cargo door dangerously unhinged Flight 534 takes off. Airborne at 30,000 feet all hell breaks loose as the giant passenger plane flies straight into an North Atlantic storm as the cargo door is torn out, causing the inside of the plane to decompress, knocking out Captan Jack as well as a number of passengers and leaving Mike Hogan all alone at the wheel with the planes fuel supply quickly being depleted.

Standard heroics with Mike and his former girlfriend cute and frisky flight attendant Katy Philips, Alexandra Paul, taking over the co-pilot controls as he replaces the wounded and unconscious Captain Jack as Flight 534's pilot. Turning the plane around in mid-flight Capatin Mike steers the aircraft to the nearest landing site before he runs out of fuel and crashes into the Atlantic: foggy and windswept Keflavik Airport in Iceland.

Besides Mike & Kathy there's also fugitive murder being brought back to stand trial in the US, Grant Blyth, Dean McDermott, who later, after he becomes religious, aborted his plan to skyjack the plane and risked his life to shut the cargo door. Thus giving Captain Mike the ability to turn and try to land the aircraft.

Besides being a fugitive from the law Grant is also a computer whiz who's able to jump the planes wires and allow it to be flown manually by Mike,who's not at all that impressed with the planes modern computer technology, and not blindly by instrument control and thus be able to land it safely at Keflavik Airport.

There's also the sweet and able air traffic controller at Keflavik Sara, Leah Pinsert, who guided the flight to safely in almost zero visibility. You would have thought that the very qualified but conceded Captain Jack would have risen to the occasion, like almost everyone else in the movie did,when things got dangerous and out of control but he did the exact opposite.

Wanting to take the control of the aircraft away from the very able and courageous Mike Hogan Captain Jack almost caused the plane to crash with his moronic antics. Which were nothing more then to re-inflate his very bruised ego that was busted by Mike being able to do a much better job of flying, and landing, the aircraft then he did.

Maybe someone else can find something other than clichés in this movie but I couldn't. I generally enjoy airplanes-in-trouble movies. By their very nature they're pregnant with suspense and raise all sorts of questions, like, "What the hell are we doing up here at 37,000 feet???" This is the kind of movie that "Airplane" parodied 25 years ago, except that I'm not sure "Airplane" did a better job of sending up the genre than "Rough Air" does.

There's a scene in "Airplane," for instance, in which a trembling flight attendant confesses to another her fear that the airplane and everyone on it is doomed. Then she adds, "And also I'm twenty-six years old and not married yet," and breaks into sobs.

In this movie a cargo door blows out, decompressing the fuselage and taking part of the tail assembly off. The airplane is a wreck. It shudders and lurches and will never make Keraktovic, Iceland, or whatever it is. (It's not Reykyavik, and Shannon and Prestwick are portmanteaued into Shanwick.) The airplane is falling apart piece by piece. And two flight attendance are whispering together aft. One of them has had an affair with the pilot and smiles as she describes the experience. "I had hoped for a family. All the usual things. Then one day he just left. And that was all. It's over now. Of course he was -- great!" The other leans forward conspiratorially and asks, "Great?" They are about to die and they're discussing how good Eric Roberts is in bed.

Roberts is the co-pilot who has had to take over when the captain goes nuts, although Roberts himself is under a cloud for a previous pilot error. (He was really innocent.) Two of the braver passengers are in the luggage compartment trying to block the hole in the fuselage with heavy baggage. (Why? I don't know.) It's a dangerous job. They could be sucked out at any time as they struggled with the crates and trunks. One of them is a murderer being taken to prison. (All airplanes have handcuffed murderers aboard, accompanied by a cop who fails in his duty.) In the midst of their exertions, the other passenger asks why the criminal did it. The two of them must shout over the howling slipstream and screaming jet engines. Still, the murder stops hustling the baggage and explains his motives. "He stole everything from me. My wife. My money. My life. I felt all empty inside." He completes the dangerous task, which will help save the airplane, and is sucked out to answer to a higher authority.

There's also one of those passengers who carries a lot of authority, some kind of high muckamuck in Global Circumcisional Airlines or something, and he makes a pain out of himself, bullying other, demanding to know what's going on, and generally getting in the way of things.

I missed the kid, though. I mean the child that's always on these stricken aircraft. Sometimes they need a kidney transplant. Sometimes a rare type of blood transfusion. Sometimes they suffer from peanut allergies. But they're always sick. I missed the kid.

Maybe that's why this movie is so unsatisfying. I burst into a torrent of tears when I heard the flight attendant say that it was all over between her and the pilot. (This was just before she told the joke about the difference between a stewardess and a jet engine.) I wept abjectly when the murderer poured out his tale of woe. But I could have flooded with tears this abandoned railway car that I live in -- if only that sick kid could have been aboard and have her life saved.

I'm -- I'm sorry. I can't go on. I'm choked with an unidentifiable but overwhelming emotion the chief symptom of which is nausea.

This movie unrolls as if the producers had seen both the "Flying High" (aka "Airplane") movies and then immediately decided to make a serious movie based very heavily on what they saw.

A previous imdb critique of "Sphere" had Sharon Stone's delivery sounding like she was reading her lines as a hostage with a gun held to her head. In this movie, most of the actors deliver their lines like that; or maybe that they're seeing them for the first time ever on a teleprompter.

The good-guy copilot is cheerful and likeable, the bad-guy captain is arrogant and immediately dislikeable. The stewardesses smile brightly at each other as they chat. And on the first meeting of the featured passengers, straight away you could tell who would not live to see the end of the movie. See what I mean? It's altogether far too much like "FH".

The purpose of the savage dog in the cargo compartment escaped me completely.

The computer-generated images of the plane in flight are quite good, but they're not enough to rescue this movie. It was mildly entertaining, but no more than that.

"Mike Hogan" (Eric Roberts) is a pilot who has been temporarily suspended because of an accident that wasn't his fault. However, when an international flight is in desperate need of a co-pilot he is coaxed into accepting the assignment in the hope that he might regain his former status. As it so happens his former girlfriend "Katy Phillips" (Alexandra Paul) is also on the flight as the head stewardess which creates a bit of an awkward situation for both of them. Even worse is the fact that the pilot "Captain Jack Brooks" (Kevin Jubinville) is a total jerk who treats Mike with complete disdain. Along with that one of the passengers named "Cal Matthews" (Carlo Rota) is almost as bad as Captain Brooks. That said however, none of these situations remotely compares to the problem Mike has to contend with once the flight takes off across the Atlantic Ocean en route to Boston. Anyway, rather than detail the entire story and risk spoiling the film for those who haven't seen it I will just say that I thought this was an enjoyable movie for the most part. While it's true that most of the events depicted in this movie have been done before at one time or another I liked most of the actors involved and thought they performed fairly well together. Also having attractive actresses like Anne Openshaw (as "Flight Attendant Tracey Nichols") along with the aforementioned Alexandra Paul certainly didn't hurt either. In short, I liked this movie and I rate it as slightly above average.

I enjoyed this movie. It was nice to see Eric Roberts as a "good guy" again for a change. Good variety of characters. I liked the idea of the prisoner on board risking his life for the passengers. Enjoyed seeing the arrogant captain tied up!