Plot: When terrorists hijack a flight, one man must find a way to save everyone on board.
You know when an action movie starts off and misspells Libya you’re going to be in for some quality viewing and Air Marshal was certainly entertaining but perhaps for all the wrong reasons. Released 2 years after 9/11 this poorly timed film is about terrorists taking over a plane with a lone Air Marshal (Dean Cochran) the only one who can stop them.
There isn’t anything we haven’t seen in many other, better films but I’ll admit I still found entertainment mostly in Dean Cochran who makes for a likeable lead (and would have made a decent Superman perhaps) but we also get the bonus addition of Tim Thomerson whose awesomeness should never be questioned.
There is some hilariously bad CGI in this movie and the camera is shaking for the majority of the run time to try and simulate the plane moving but all it did was give me motion sickness.
Dean looks the part as the action hero and tries to find any excuse to take his shirt off but he also has the moves in the fight scenes due to his martial arts training in real life.
The villains make little impression (although Ammar Daraiseh is suitably crazed) and are just stereotypical bad guys so the film in that respect really doesn’t hold up well.
Overall, Air Marshal doesn’t have much to recommend it other than Dean Cochran and Tim Thomerson but the awful visual effects and too-close-to-reality story make it hard to sit through. If you want a similar kind of movie I’d watch Non-Stop instead as it’s just slicker in every way.
