Big-budget action movies don’t have to make sense — and many of them don’t. But they ought to offer us something so delicious or exciting that we won’t miss the plausibility. Humor or character. Snap-crackling pace or a roaring good time.
That’s exactly what we don’t get in “Executive Decision,” producer Joel Silver’s latest multimillion-dollar techno-crazy bone-crusher. The movie — which takes place aboard a 747 jetliner hijacked by Arab terrorists, loaded with enough deadly nerve gas to wipe out the East Coast and speeding its way toward Washington, D.C. — is grimly absurd, relentlessly batty.
This would-be box-office bonanza is so stripped of real emotion or logic, so loud and bumpy, that watching it is like standing in back of a jet engine on takeoff. The movie may knock you on your butt, but not necessarily because it’s any good.
“Executive Decision” is another “Die Hard” variation. But this time, there’s a whole “Die Hard” team: a group of special forces commandos who have snuck on board the 747 in mid-flight (using an experimental new dwarf commando plane), lost their radio, lost their lieutenant colonel (Steven Seagal), and are now led by an intelligence expert in a tuxedo (Kurt Russell), who was whisked away from a party when the crisis broke.
While these orphan commandos sneak around the cargo area and fuselage, peek through holes they drill in the walls and floors and try to disarm the nerve gas bomb without snipping the wrong wire, the terrorists — who are mean but not too alert — stalk around the passenger cabin. The bad guys are like the cat in a Tom and Jerry cartoon: They see and hear almost nothing, even when the commandos almost drill through their toes.
These cookie-cutter heroes and villains, swaggering across the screen, fondling their weaponry, scowling and sweating, can’t even be called cartoonish, though — most cartoon characters have more energy and personality than this. They’re generic action characters, out of Tom Clancy thrillers, there to get blown up and blasted or to blast other people, give pep talks or watch all the carnage and scream helplessly.
The writers, brothers Jim and John Thomas, have fashioned other high-tech thrill machines for Silver — notably the two “Predator” movies. And though they know how to construct these things, they’re not too daring.
They’ve filled “Executive Decision” with all the usual human cliches. A plucky flight attendant (Halle Berry). An opportunistic U.S. senator and presidential candidate (J.T. Walsh). Tough, fat marshals. Sneaky-looking businessmen hunched over laptop computers. Worried-looking moms. And a racially mixed commando unit that includes an Asian-American (B.D. Wong), an African-American (Joe Morton), a Latino-American (John Leguizamo), a few white guys in crewcuts and a brainy, whining, techno-fatty (Oliver Platt) who got dragged along because he designed the commando plane.
Watching the ads, you might imagine this movie is going to show a battle of wills between Russell’s bespectacled Grant and Seagal’s tough guy Travis over how to retake the plane. But, in their most daring innovation, Silver and the producing-writing Thomases kill off Seagal in the first half-hour.
Essentially, the movie uses Seagal as a red herring: the presumed action hero and special forces leader, Lt. Col. Austin Travis, who gets blown away (literally) early on when the commandos are sneaking on board and Travis gets stuck between planes. That leaves everything up to second-in-command Rat (Leguizamo) and Russell’s tux-clad Grant.
Russell gives Grant a suave but harried look, a bit like Ryan O’Neal in “What’s Up, Doc?” or Cary Grant in “Bringing Up Baby.” But the movie isn’t after that kind of humor. When Seagal disappears we’re supposed to worry whether Russell has the guts for the job. And since we know Russell as primarily a movie macho-man — albeit one with more sides and colors than Seagal — the suspense is not exactly overpowering.
Chief among the heavies and hijackers — and the main reason for protests against the films from Arab-American groups — is Nagi Hassan (David Suchet), who spends much of the movie absorbed in a pocket edition of the Koran, perusing it intently between sporadic eruptions of villainy. Hassan is such a heavy, he’s even lied to his fellow fanatics about his plot to destroy the Eastern Seaboard.
Suchet plays Hassan as a kind of dour, quietly menacing killjoy. When he’s challenged to justify his murderous schemes, he begins to reply, “According to the Koran . . .” But he’s immediately interrupted and never completes the sentence.
Should anyone take nonsense like this seriously? The premise of “Executive Decision” is as ludicrous as the hardware and technology are overpowering. This is techno-tripe on a massive scale. And the fact that almost everyone involved in the production is a top-notch pro only proves that professionalism isn’t everything.
The movie has been guided by a first-time director, Stuart Baird, a frequent head editor on Silver’s action specials. But Baird doesn’t show the kind of flair that editors like David Lean or Robert Wise demonstrated when they switched over. As a matter of fact, Baird shows almost no flair at all, anywhere. At times, it almost seems as if this movie’s director got blown away in the boarding accident along with Seagal — as if the cast and crew, like the commandos, had to make it on their own.
“Executive Decision” doesn’t look good, even though it was shot by the great action-movie cinematographer Alex Thomson (“Excalibur,” “Cliffhanger”) and designed by Terence Marsh (“Doctor Zhivago,” “Oliver!”). The performances are almost universally shallow, hokey or nondescript — even though it’s an impressive cast. (You’d never guess how good actors such as Leguizamo, Walsh, Morton or Russell can be by looking at them here.) And even the pacing is often sluggish.
At one point early on, the characters walk through a Washington office complex and somebody in the background yells something that sounded like: “This is a think tank! Let’s start thinking!” Good idea.
“Executive Decision” — which takes its title from the fact that it took an executive decision to get the action started — is less a movie than a loud, heavy, money machine, a think tank where nobody thinks. The movie seems intended to extract maximum profit with minimum artistry — and if you like having your pockets picked by experts, this is probably the show to see.
You can almost picture the bunch that made “Executive Decision”: true believers with lots of guns, bombs and cameras swaggering through the carnage they’ve created, deeply immersed in a copy of “Variety.” “According to Variety . . .” they might begin to explain to us. But, like Nagi Hassan, they’d probably have to break off in mid-sentence.
”EXECUTIVE DECISION”
(star) (star)
Directed by Stuart Baird; written by Jim and John Thomas; photographed by Alex Thomson (additional cinematography by Don Burgess); edited by Dallas Pruitt, Frank J. Urioste; production designed by Terence Marsh; music by Jerry Goldsmith; produced by Joel Silver. A Warner Brothers release; opens Friday. Running time: 2:12. MPAA rating: R. Language, violence.
THE CAST
Dr. David Grant …………………….. Kurt Russell
Lt. Col. Austin Travis ………………. Steven Seagal
Jean ………………………………. Halle Berry
Rat ……………………………….. John Leguizamo
Dennis Cahill ………………………. Oliver Platt
Nagi Hassan ………………………… David Suchet
