As something of a forgotten staple of the disaster film, the Airport franchise went out of its way for a decade to disprove the fact that air travel is statistically the safest way to travel. Be it manic-depressive bombers, mid-air collisions, or art theives causing a luxury plane to end up at the bottom of the ocean, it was a toss up so see what each installment was trying to achieve the most: put airlines out of commission or keep a constantly returning George Kennedy in work.
Well, with its fouth and final installment, The Concorde… Airport ’79 (no, I have no idea why the title includes a dramatic pause either), the film doubled down to achieve both and in turn turned in its wildest – and stupidest – entry to date.
With a less starry cast, a smaller budget and and an actual plot so deranged it reads like it was written in shit on the wall of an asylum, this might be one flight serious filmgoers might wanna avoid. But if you love your bad, trashy movies, prepare to get a crap-load of air miles…
The Concorde. It was big, white and was taken out in 2003 – much like Buddy Hackett – but back in 1979 it was all the rage after it’s first commercial flight only a few years earlier. It’s during this heyday that we stumble onto the shifty, under the table dealings of arms dealer Kevin Harrison who has been selling weapons to communist countries during the Cold War and someone who has discovered his illegal activities is his girlfriend, reporter Maggie Whelan. While the question of why such a corrupt man would be so dumb as to date a reporter of all people goes predictably unanswered, Harrison decides to protect his interests by targeting the Concorde flight she’s about to take with his experimental, surface-to-air missile project, the Buzzard.
Once the plane is in the air, we start to meet the usual hodgepodge of eccentrics that make up the crew and passengers, but among this gaggle of comic relief stoners and mothers transporting a heart on ice for her child, we find that franchise regular Joe Patroni has shifted careers within the airline industry yet again and is now – for some reason – a pilot. However, before we have much time to ponder this, the Concorde is targeted by first the Buzzard and then an unmarked F-4 Phantom jet (also sent by Harrison) are dispatched to bring the plane down. However, some impressive far-fetched flying gets them as far as France where the plane lands and everyone can take the night off to get laid – or whatever.
But when the Concorde prepares to finish it’s journey to Moscow, one of Harrison’s agents tinkers with the cargo hatch, causing it to open mid-flight and subject the aircraft to pressures it can’t possibly withstand. Can his borderline Dick Dastardly attempts to Concorde down possibly come to fruition, or will Patroni’s skill on the stick save the day?
I would never go out of my way to describe any of the Aiport sequels as “good” movies, but when it comes to shoving craggy, aging actors at a possible air disaster, there’s seldom been a clutch of movies that depict potential tragedy with such enjoyable gusto. As the plots got worse, the actors more desperate and the actual disasters got progressively more outlandish, my enjoyment level seemed to grow as things got ever more threadbare, but while The Concorde… Airport ’79 is by far the worst of a increasingly bad bunch, you’re still pretty much guaranteed a coach load of unintentional laughs.
Most of these come from George Kennedy’s returning good luck charm, Joe Patroni, a man who somehow has the C.V. of a compulsive liar as he’s somehow gone from chief mechanic, to vice president of operations, to consultant, to pilot for four separate airlines in under a decade. However, as usual, Kennedy just seems jazzed to be here and with his expanded role that now plonks him literally in the pilot’s seat of the action. Simply put, he’s a one-man dynamo of bizarre line readings and questionable action sequences, but the movie leans into it like a cringe junkie and when he isn’t given subplots where he ends up accidently shagging a prostitute in France or saying lines like “my boy has just started college, my wife has been dead for about a year” with a massive grin on his face, he’s aiming a flare gun out of the open side window of the plane as it loop de loops to shoot down an approaching missile.
In the face of watching a doughy, fifty something character actor attempt to pull off shit that a Fast And Furious movie would struggle to sell, the rest of the cast don’t have much to add. Robert Wagner looks suitably menacing in the standard villainous turtleneck, but his plans are so hopelessly convoluted and strangely obvious, he might as well be wearing a t-shirt that says “I’m trying to kill my girlfriend” – which would retroactively prove to be in massively bad taste if you know your Hollywood history. Elsewhere we get David Warner complaining about his diet, Alain Delone’s co-pilot wooing his stewardess, Jimmy Walker alternating between blowing on his sax or sucking on a joint to get highervthan the plane he’s in and a running sub-plot about an old lady’s weak bladder and while none are particularly engrossing, they are all so insipid in their own way, they end up being enjoyable for all the wrong reasons.
Also, some of the choices made by the script are similarly confounding. Having the plane safely land in France mid-film, only to take off the very next morning to immediately get into yet more trouble torpedos the tension faster than if the Orca from Jaws decided to throw in the towel for the night and pop back to port in time for dinner. Also, it’s quite amusing that the special effects guys don’t seem to give much of a shit if they manage to accurately recreate the actual flight capabilities of a Concorde or not as the thing flips, twirls, spirals and u-turns like it’s being waved around by a four year old child that’s smoking to same stuff that Jimmy Walker is.
Be it the constant cuts to the screaming passengers as they’re spun round like clothes in a spin dryer or virtually everything that George Kennedy says or does, The Concorde… Airport ’79 may not be the most auspicious end to an enjoyable silly franchise, but when you stop to consider how weird the series got, the fact that the last one is completely off its rocker is strangely fitting. After all, when you line it up with such previous sights as a ruddy faced Dean Martin trying to talk down a suicide bomber, Charlton Heston being lowered out the back of a plane in order to climb into another plane, the sight of a drowned Christopher Lee bobbing past his wife’s window seat, Airport was always a franchise that was at its most fun when it was in the middle of a nosedive.
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