Executive Decision

• Directed by Stuart Baird (Directorial Debut)
• March 15, 1996

A team placed on a plane mid-flight must save the aircraft from hijackers who have planted a deadly toxin onboard.

Executive Decision is a good action film from back when they really knew how to do such things. And strangely it’s technically a Steven Seagal movie (but he’s not the main character). In fact his character of Lieutenant Colonel Austin Travis doesn’t even make it through the first third. He’s the leader of a special forces to unit. Our hero is Snake Plissken himself Kurt Russell as Dr. David Grant who here works for a think tank and finds himself aboard a plane with the remnants of Steven Seagal’s team trying to stop detective Hercule Poirot as David Suchet as terrorist Nagi Hassan who is on a suicide mission essentially.

I think Steven Seagal might still be employable in major motion pictures to this day if he could stow his ego a bit. Certainly not great by any measure in this, but he’s serviceable enough. He’s a military man who doesn’t like Grant because Grant’s information used on a mission we see at the beginning of the film was not effective. It turns out they were just behind. Nothing too intense but he makes the rivalry work.

The action is minimal but good. Executive Decision is more a game of cat and mouse with the cat (the terrorists) virtually unaware of the mice (the Special Forces team) in the house. Our villain of the story is using his brother being in prison as an excuse to conduct a hijacking. He has ulterior motives which Grant and his think tank correctly deduce. What gets me is nobody figures out who the actual assistant to the villain is. Clearly stopping the villain wouldn’t be enough and there’s another bad guy who’s Plan B. 

This works mostly on tension. There is some humor to alleviate that tension, but it doesn’t undercut anything they do. This story runs on a ticking clock which for the heroes is running a little fast. They only have so much time or they’re going to be shot out of the sky which concerns me a bit. if it’s so deadly, shooting the plane down would create a toxic plume somewhere either in the air or on the ground. It may not wipe out the entire Eastern seaboard, but you might get a good chunk of Canada or even just Nova Scotia.

There is some questionable logic at points but by being intelligent with most things they overcome that. It’s not big and dumb, but rather much smarter than one would give it credit for. If anything, you could look at it as a knock off of Air Force One minus the president. And as with any movie like this there’s one idiot who thinks they got everything under control but ends up getting themselves killed. In this case it’s slimy US senator Jason Mavros (J.T. Walsh) looking to give himself some political credentials by negotiating with a terrorist, but he’s just victim number one. 

Kurt Russell, Steven Seagal in his heyday, Halle Berry, John Leguizamo, Oliver Platt, Joe Morton, David Suchet, Andreas Katsulas, J.T. Walsh, and B.D. Wong. That alone is a great deal of talent to be a part of any movie. I’m just a little confused how Marla Maples Trump who played Nancy got her name in the opening credits. This is not an anti-Trump diatribe on my part. Rather in this movie she doesn’t do much of anything. She says maybe all of 10 words and spends more time reacting to events than anything else. The woman who got killed when her head hit the counter had more lines than Marla Maples Trump.

The characters are all likable. See you care about what happens to them. But more importantly, the villain is interesting as well. You may not be cheering him on, but much like Khan in Star Trek he is so good that him being successful might not be entirely objectionable. He’s just evil, but such a good evil. But then again the actor behind him is good.

Grant is his intellectual equal. And has the bonus of intimately knowing the man even if he does not know what the man looks like. That bit originally struck me as silly but in real life seems have some basis in reality. Photographic evidence of terrorists can be scant. Thought or dumb creative luck?

Stuart Baird and friends get a lot of mileage out of their relatively small setting. Much of what you get takes place in the cockpit, right around the galley, and in the cargo area. This is not a building or even Air Force One which you could imagine a great deal of space to play in. There’s nowhere for the heroic characters to go they wouldn’t be discovered. They need to stay put yet with a handful of settings we get an exciting and attention-holding film. 

And of course, in a movie like this, there are a few close calls. Mostly at the hands of Grant who eventually finds his footing. And aside from that one idiot center senator there’s nobody that pulls the cliché and screws the future of the whole plan before it’s implemented, forcing everybody to wing it. A highlight of this film is the necessary pairing of civilian aeronautic engineer Dennis Cahill (Oliver Platt) and the Special Forces bomb tech First Sergeant Campbell “Cappy” Matheny (Joe Morton). At the same time as Travis is killed, Matheny is seriously injured and must be immobilized. Cahill must become Matheny’s hands and the two work together to stop the bomb.

I’m not sure I consider Executive Decision a classic, but it’s pretty darn close if it isn’t. It’s exciting and intense. You will stay glued to your seat from start to finish. Highly recommended!