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“Air Force One” is the kind of movie that grabs you by the collar, shouts “GET OFF MY PLANE,” and dares you not to grin through the whole ride. It’s the most unabashedly earnest “Fly Hard” ever committed to film—yes, it’s Die Hard on a plane, and yes, it knows it. Yet somehow, through sheer force of will (and Harrison Ford’s presidential scowl), it keeps its two-plus hours aloft with crowd-pleasing momentum.
Sure, the premise is absurd to the point of parody: the President of the United States personally throwing hands with terrorists at 30,000 feet. The script asks you to swallow far more than peanuts—plot holes you could taxi a 747 through, logic leaps that would make John McClane blush, and an “Idiot Plot” where the villains make decisions that seem scientifically engineered to defeat themselves to keep the movie going. But the movie never stops long enough for any of that to really sink in. It just keeps hustling, barreling from corridor shootout to cockpit crisis like a blockbuster with someplace urgent to be.
The special effects… well, bless them. Even in the late ’90s, some of these shots looked suspiciously like the world’s most patriotic PlayStation cutscenes. But their rubbery seams and digital wobble just add to the charm—this is a movie that’s trying so hard to thrill you that you forgive it for occasionally looking like a flight simulator running on Windows 95.
And that’s the thing: despite its flaws—maybe even because of them—Air Force One is a blast. Ford and Oldman chew the scenery with gusto, the pacing never really sags, and the film delivers exactly the kind of fist-pumping, flag-waving nonsense it promises. It might be ridiculous, but it’s ridiculously entertaining.
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