On a Wing and a Prayer

As a hobbyist pilot, if there's an airplane movie, I'm watching it: Positives: 1) Good family movie that is not afraid to use faith. 2) it's got cute Heather Graham who did not sell herself to the monster Harvey Weinstein. 3) Heather praying the Lord's Prayer (I'm not religious, but the way this nation is heading to, I'm becoming more of faith).

Negatives: 1) Lacking serious aviation technical advice. Vertical speed indicator's showing a gradual descend, yet the altimeter is climbing like a rocket, and many others. 2) Like some have mentioned, annoying kids.

I do fly many Angel Flights in South FL, hopefully I'll hear Doug over the radio one day.

This movie has a great story that takes you with them on the real journey that happened to a family.

Was it the best movie out there no but it keeps you engaged and has some twists, that did happen, that make this even more of a miracle flight.

If you enjoy movies based on true stories and a miracle saves them type then you will probably like this movie.

As for all the negative reviews I read it sounds mostly like those reviewers expect every movie to be made with special effects and high quality everything. Someone said it needed more (based on a true story there isn't more) and someone said it needed less action. It's a guy flying a plane any less action and it's just a guy standing by a plane..

Sometimes less can be more. They went way too over the top with this movie. They didn't need all the extra stuff, it was dramatic enough to begin with. They didn't need kids explaining everything. They didn't need to create any additional stressful situations on the plane itself when it was already stressful enough anyways. They could have simply told the story exactly as it happened and the movie would have been better for it. Sometimes I can understand movies really hyping things up, but this was never going to be an action movie and they tried to turn it into one, which didn't work out well, in my opinion.

If you want to actually watch this as it happened, there's a Youtube video about it on the channel FS Mania titled "PILOT DIES, Passenger Lands King Air". It recreates the entire incident in Microsoft Flight Simulator while using the actual transmissions from the incident. It's about 10x better than this movie is, while also only taking up about 40 minutes. Just watch that instead. Save yourself some time and watch a better video while you're doing it.

...but I couldn't. The first part of the movie was just tedious. I know it was about building up the family context, but it was tedious. There were several points where I almost gave up on the movie. The blonde daughter was very annoying. There was a point where she had to grab an epi pen out of a backpack in the cargo hold, and instead of her unfastening the webbing in the cargo hold, for what seemed like a long time we had to see her panicking as she tried to frantically reach through the webbing to feel for the backpack. All I could think was "how stupid of a daughter did this guy have?" Even my 10yo son would've tried to unhook the strapping. On the plus side, it's a family friendly movie and maybe a preteen or younger might find the movie entertaining. Most adults would probably not get past the mediocre acting and plot development.

This movie is bad in every possible way with the acting and script absolutely the worst. Plot - bad. Scenery - pathetic. Directing - non existent. This movie should garner a few Razzie nominations including Worst Picture and Worst Script. They managed to turn a real life drama into a bad comedy. I endured through the movie hoping it would get better but that never happened.

I think the "best" part, or more accurately, the least bad part was after the movie ended and they had clips of the actual characters. They should have considered using these people in the movie. I would probably have liked these characters. This movie could not have been much worse. Please don't waste your time like I did!