The plot contrivances of PASSENGER 57 make the Zucker brothers' AIRPLANE look like a beacon of narrative economy-every plot point in David Loughery and Dan Gordon's derivative screenplay is set up like a sketch on 'Saturday Night Live.' Among the numerous unanswerable questions: why does a SWAT Viewers have played it one time too many.

Hooks invokes terrorists, plane crashes, gunfire and an ever-increasing body count like an old Nintendo game-the elements are all there, but Press the action buttons, achieving the rhythm and look of the major 1980s action thrillers without the grit and panache that made those films exciting. Incorporating elements of the DIE HARD blockbusters and the LETHAL WEAPON trilogy, the film has a battle-scarred familiarity, the deaths and explosions creating an unpleasant sense of deja vu in the viewer. PASSENGER 57 plays like a film Bruce Willis turned down. After the plane lands again, Marti and Cutter walk away from the bedlam to visit the fair. Innocent bystanders, Cutter smacks Rane out of the airplane, GOLDFINGER-style. Confounding Rane, Cutter hops aboard and, after a hostage-taking stand-off and the obligatory killing of Rane's henchmen are killed and he's recaptured but he negotiates himself back onto the plane and it soon taxies down the runway with the remaining passengers. He strolls around a county fair, located conveniently nearby, where Cutter, having straightened out the comedy of errors with the local sheriff, stalks him, prompting an Him for one of the bad guys and arrest him.Īs prisoners are released after the plane's landing, Rane ducks out the back way with two of his fellow terrorists. Before landing, however, Cutter is kicked out of the plane onto the runway by one of Rane's henchmen, where two bonehead Southern deputies mistake (Alex Datcher) to sneak into the aircraft's underbelly and release the plane's fuel supply, forcing the plane to land on a small airstrip in Louisiana. It is then up to Cutter and attractive airline attendant Marti Slayton

Quite understandably, Rane wants to get off the plane before it lands in California and, while Cutter is in the bathroom, Rane's camouflaged cohorts take their cue and commandeer the aircraft. John Cutter (Wesley Snipes) is a snippy and imperious airline security expert (a friend tells him 'You'd make a hell of a Republican') who finds himself aboard a flight to Los Angeles with the sneering and equally imperious Charles Rane (Bruce Payne), the latter being escorted by FBI agents toįace terrorist bombing charges. An action thriller from the Joel Silver school of Big Bang filmmaking, PASSENGER 57 smashes on the runway, an inflated cartoon of excess without a modicum of charm, wit or sense.

John cutter passenger 57