Knowing just the title and cast, you could probably free-associate the plot of Air Force One, but let me outline it for you anyway: "Russian ultra-nationalists" hijack the eponymous plane, seeking to free an imprisoned colleague in Kazakhstan. The President eludes the hijackers and works against them from within the plane. Air Force One is not just a bad movie (and it certainly is that), it is simultaneously jingoistic and an attack on the very idea of democracy.
This film is utterly steeped in the importance of its message, which seems to be that the man occupying the office of the President of the United States is worth any sacrifice, no matter how great, voluntary or otherwise. At least two people take bullets on behalf of the president, one pilot hurls his aircraft between Air Force One and an approaching missile, and dozens of others fall by the wayside in the process of restoring this one man to power. The necessity of their combined sacrifice is never questioned. It would seem director Wolfgang Peterson became so enamored of the shot of Clint Eastwood blocking John Malkovich's bullet with his body in his far superior In the Line of Fire that he sought out a script that would allow him to replay it endlessly.
The enshrinement is furthered by America's "no-tolerance" terrorism policy. The President clings to the policy, even when a staff member's life hangs in the balance, but chucks it the minute the gun is held to his daughter's head. (This way, he can seem both tough on crime and a sensitive family man - compassionate conservatism, indeed!) Instead of highlighting this inconsistency, Peterson would rather spend his time portraying the Constitutional and democratic efforts by the Cabinet to transfer power away from the President in this rather compromising situation as petty and disloyal.
I have to wonder how far the pretense would have to go before the audience found it as distasteful as I did. What if the terrorists demanded that the President free Timothy McVeigh? Or that he order the Air Force to bomb some innocent third party? Would the skin pigmentation of the third party matter? This is not a spurious question, for another message very present in this film is that the important white folks should have the privilege of agonizing over abstract dilemmas like appeasing terrorists, while the non-whites (in this case, the Kazakhs) should have to live with the consequences of those decisions. And why does the U.S. President get to say who the Kazakhs keep in jail and who they set free? This perhaps is the most sickening aspect of this film, how naturally it presents this absurd extension of Presidential authority into the matters of other sovereign nations. The President should be able to do anything to anyone because, being the President, he knows what is best. Long live democracy!
This film is utterly steeped in the importance of its message, which seems to be that the man occupying the office of the President of the United States is worth any sacrifice, no matter how great, voluntary or otherwise. At least two people take bullets on behalf of the president, one pilot hurls his aircraft between Air Force One and an approaching missile, and dozens of others fall by the wayside in the process of restoring this one man to power. The necessity of their combined sacrifice is never questioned. It would seem director Wolfgang Peterson became so enamored of the shot of Clint Eastwood blocking John Malkovich's bullet with his body in his far superior In the Line of Fire that he sought out a script that would allow him to replay it endlessly.
The enshrinement is furthered by America's "no-tolerance" terrorism policy. The President clings to the policy, even when a staff member's life hangs in the balance, but chucks it the minute the gun is held to his daughter's head. (This way, he can seem both tough on crime and a sensitive family man - compassionate conservatism, indeed!) Instead of highlighting this inconsistency, Peterson would rather spend his time portraying the Constitutional and democratic efforts by the Cabinet to transfer power away from the President in this rather compromising situation as petty and disloyal.
I have to wonder how far the pretense would have to go before the audience found it as distasteful as I did. What if the terrorists demanded that the President free Timothy McVeigh? Or that he order the Air Force to bomb some innocent third party? Would the skin pigmentation of the third party matter? This is not a spurious question, for another message very present in this film is that the important white folks should have the privilege of agonizing over abstract dilemmas like appeasing terrorists, while the non-whites (in this case, the Kazakhs) should have to live with the consequences of those decisions. And why does the U.S. President get to say who the Kazakhs keep in jail and who they set free? This perhaps is the most sickening aspect of this film, how naturally it presents this absurd extension of Presidential authority into the matters of other sovereign nations. The President should be able to do anything to anyone because, being the President, he knows what is best. Long live democracy!