Movie Review: Executive Decision (1996)

Original title: Executive Decision
Year: 1996
Duration: 133 min.
Country: United States
Directed by: Stuart Baird
Screenplay: Jim Thomas, John Thomas
With: Kurt Russell, Halle Berry, John Leguizamo, Oliver Platt, Joe Morton, David Suchet, Steven Seagal, BD Wong, Len Cariou, Whip Hubley, Andreas Katsulas, Mary Ellen Trainor, Marla Maples Trump, J.T. Walsh, Charles Hallahan.
Grade: 6

Warner Brothers

Spoiler Alert. This review is going to reveal some key plot points of the movie, but a) it's a 25-year-old movie, b) you've probably seen it already.

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Here we have a terrorist group hijacking a passenger plane in retaliation for the kidnapping of a major terrorist leader (Andreas Katsulas). David Grant (Kurt Russell) is a paid government analyst who is called in to give his opinion. For him, the plane hijacking is part of a plan to drop poison gas on Washington DC. The masterminds on duty assign Colonel Travis (Steven Seagal) and his men to board the plane in flight and recover the ship.

So the group of commandos boards a special plane created to dock with other aircraft in flight. Grant and Dennis Cahill (Oliver Platt), the creator of the plane in question also go. The ships dock, but the 747 changes its altitude and the communicating seal is broken, and Travis is killed when he is ejected into the void. And this is the great twist of this film, or at least it was in 1996.

You have to remember that in 1996 Steven Seagal was still a respectable B-series action star, on a par with Jean-Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris or Michael Dudikoff, with considerable box office drag. It was unthinkable that Seagal would die in the middle of the movie! To reinforce the wow factor, posters at the time featured Seagal alongside Russell, on an equal footing, shall we say. And yet, the guy dies when the thing is just beginning.

At the beginning of the film we see Grant taking flight lessons and landing a small plane. What doubt is there that at some point the pilots are going to be disabled and Grant is going to have to land the plane himself? The same goes for the plastic stick that Cahill chews on throughout the film, and which will eventually prove essential in defusing the bomb. But that inexorable predictability is offset by the almost imperceptible twists that keep the viewer's interest alive for 132 minutes.

Executive Decision works and is worth seeing more than once, even when we already know how it ends. This is due in no small measure to the work of the secondary players, who give grace to the lines they have to say and lend credibility to situations that we have already seen a thousand times. This goes doubly for Oliver Platt and Halle Berry, whose respective characters, in other hands, would have been unbearable. My only complaint is that J.T. Walsh, a typical '90s bad guy, is wasted in a role that gives him very little screen time. There are also some very small roles in the "table is set" style, which mostly serve to put on the screen some faces that we remember from some old TV series, like, for example, Charles Hallahan (Hunter) or Ken Jenkins (Scrubs). And it's OK. In short, an entertaining and more than decent movie.