AIRPLANE! (1980)
Jim never has a second cup of coffee at home.
This movie is a full-blown comedy about a WWII vet who ends up having to land a plane he’s never flown before after the pilots and some other passengers ate fish and became sick. The vet's name is Ted Striker (played by Robert Hays), and he lost most of his men in a dogfight over the Rio Grande, but that’s not important right now. What is important is that he’s got to land this plane. Along with a former lover Elaine (played by Julie Hagerty who so far has parlayed the role into a 40 year + career), they will have to overcome just about every gag, joke, fist fight, flashback, newspaper headline, and glue sniffer involved to survive.
Being one of the greatest comedy classics of all time (it’s part of the National Film Registry), this movie is also loaded with stars. Everyone from Lloyd Bridges to Kareem Addul-Jabbar shows up in this flick. We even get a Barbara Billingsley sighting. AIRPLANE might be a bit too much for the sensitivities of the PC crowd because a lot like KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE, it isn’t holding any punches and it really doesn’t care what you think. The working title for the movie was actually “Kentucky Fried Airplane”. While the film is still as funny today as it was 40 years ago, there are some elements that I can see offending today’s crowd. Most of the jokes are straightforward and have a sense of timelessness to them while others are more a product of the time the movie was filmed in. In one example a phone call is made to the Mayo Clinic which is always for cancer patients. In the movie, however, the Mayo Clinic has tons of mayonnaise jars all over the place. Other jokes are more on the subtly raunchy side, but nothing compared to most stand-up comedy acts of today.
The acting and direction in this movie is impeccable and to this day is still one of the best or if not the best spoof ever made. The effects and sets are actually really well done for a comedy, but some of the flashback scenes are more annoying than funny. There is a lot going on in this thing and you really probably have to watch it more than once if you haven’t seen it to take it all in. A lot of the humor is dialog-driven and utilizes things going on in the background and over-reaction to draw out the laughs. I would dare to say that the Simpsons, probably wouldn’t still be on the air if they didn’t utilize AIRPLANE’s style of humor for so many years. This movie also sparked a sequel that I actually like even better.
For me, AIRPLANE is a solid 6 out of 7. While the comedy is amazing and I would love to see as many films along this line as possible, there are some slower parts that drag the film down mostly by way of flashbacks.
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