Robert Butler's 'Turbulence': Just plane entertainment

By Laksmi Pamuntjak-Djohan

JAKARTA (JP): Originality seems to scare Hollywood; if a film can't be discussed in terms of something that has already been a success, how can it be marketed? Action films of late have been particularly telling of this trend, with Die Hard surgically attached to virtually every premise.

Thus, Robert Butler's Turbulence can be a number of things. A feminist Die Hard. An airborne Speed. A merry mix of Airport, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Boston Strangler. Or a sequel more aptly called Unlawful Entry 2: The Unfriendly Skies. It certainly has elements of all of the above, and then some.

In essence, it sports nothing more than your standard Hollywood airplane-disaster formula with a bit of psycho-on-the- loose thrown in for good measure. A sparsely filled 747 is on its way from New York to L.A. on Christmas Eve with two (yes, two) death row inmates on board. Soon enough, the four federal marshal escorts end up dead. The pilot and co-pilot also end up dead, as do a few others. The more dangerous of the two convicts, serial killer Ryan Weaver a.k.a. the Lonely Hearts Strangler (Ray Liotta) necessarily stays alive so that he can run around stalking people at will and crashing the plane into downtown L.A. On top of all that, the pilotless plane is headed into the mother of all storms. It's up to the plucky flight attendant, Teri Halloran (Lauren Holly), to eliminate the psycho and land the plane safely.

Of course, we've seen all this before, albeit in varying forms and levels of gratuity. For those who survived the 70s, with its profusion of airport movies, the airplane disaster genre seems like a connecting flight to a tsunami of suffocating memories: obnoxious kids, guitar-playing nuns muttering imprecations, helpless passengers with sitcom-like character quirks.

Agreed, the 90s have dispensed with the conventions of the past and focused on novel forms of politically correct, eclectic terror. Drop Zone, Passenger 57 and Critical Decision are fine examples, all with their own rendition of the standard land-the- jumbo routine for first-time pilots. Yet, in Turbulence, the presence of Ben Cross as Captain Bowen manages to wring some believability by talking Halloran through the landing procedure.

While "Stubbs" is played by Brendan Gleeson (Braveheart), with all the grace of a wrestling champion, the film would have us believe that the smoother exterior of the other criminal belies a deadlier character. It is very well for the film to pretend for a while that Weaver may not be guilty. But therein lies the problem: it doesn't work. An enigma and Ray Liotta don't go well together: we know it's only a matter of time before he snaps.

In fact, you can just see through his thin veneer the minute he makes insistent eye contact with the flustered Halloran. That's one of the drawbacks of casting an actor like Liotta in this role. Aided by his piercing blue eyes and an eerie smile, he has vastly degenerated from the onetime Golden Globe nominee with a solid career start in Goodfellas, to being eternally trapped in whacksville. Check out No Escape and Unlawful Entry.

Even so, telegraphing virtually all of its own punches isn't Turbulence's worst defect. Silliness is. Why send such dangerous convicts with only four guards, and why on a commercial flight? What possible purpose can a garishly festooned airplane serve other than preparing for the eventual melee in which the sicko strangles someone with a string of blinking Christmas lights?

If you were a guard, would you allow your prisoner to go to the toilet five minutes after takeoff? If you were the last person left flying an airplane on the verge of a free fall, and there is a serial killer waiting for you outside, would you leave the safely locked cockpit to roam around the plane to check on the rest of the crew? But lest we forget, this film takes many of its cues from schlock horror films. Thus, heroines necessarily prefer to play Sigourney Weaver rather than rely on "plane ol' common sense."

The dialogue, penned by onetime Oscar nominee Jonathan Brett, doesn't help either. A petrified Halloran learns that her plane is bucking through a "level 6" storm and kittenishly asks ground control, "Is that 6 as in 1 to 10?". The response: "No, that's 6 as in 1 to 6." When the leader of the Crisis Center (Rachel Ticotin) reassures Halloran by telling her, "You are flying the most sophisticated plane ever built.", Halloran replies "Yes, but what if this sophisticated plane flies into an unsophisticated storm?"

Mega bucks

But nothing quite beats the absurdity of Weaver's interplay with Halloran just as the plane is plunging into the heart of the storm. Inspired, perhaps, by the deadly movie trivia in Wes Craven's latest horror film Scream, or by the "Smart Women/Foolish Choices" tradition, Weaver quizzes Halloran on her favorite movie, Gone with the Wind, her favorite book (ditto), her first sexual experience ("at 18 1/2") and whether she enjoyed it ("yes"). Any palpable tension drains away as they engage in this senseless aero-banter.

Having taken the lead from Speed, Twister, etc., Turbulence has assembled an impossible situation, a battle with the elements, an unstoppable villain, and the requisite one-word, generic title that's currently in vogue. It has spent mega bucks on special effects, and is heading for a crash landing. It also goes a few steps back along the proverbial tracks only to sport a smokey, darkly lit cinematography that makes you wonder whether you're not in fact watching Airport '75.

But, while films like Speed and Die Hard have managed to bask in the glory of their own excesses, with their original, winning spirit effectively glossing over the bits of illogic, Turbulence is still far from that league. It is both plane and plain entertainment, borrowing ideas from here and there, playing it safe throughout. And like airplane food, it's filling enough, yet no one is likely to ask the stewardess -- correction, the flight attendant -- for the recipe.