Nayan Gough
A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.
Robert J. Maxwell
The passengers are emplaning on Flight 69 of Global Circumcisional Airlines for Minneapolis. They are the usual diverse lot. We know one of them must be a hijacker because the title of the movie is "Skyjacked." It's always fun to try to pick the villain out of a crowd. We can immediately dispose of the black, generous, cello player, Rosie Greer. We can forget about the sergeant in the US Army, James Brolin -- unless he's a phony. The pregnant wife is out, unless she's got a device stashed in that swollen abdomen. I missed the little child who desperately needs a kidney transplant or a transfusion of rare blood, but since there is no such child, he or she is out too. Another passenger is depressed but not suicidally. It's certainly not the incandescent young Susan Dey. Nobody with that overbite could plant a bomb. The Senator is played by the avuncular Walter Pidgeon, so he's out. I suppose we can discount the priest. It would be a novelty if the villain were one of the crew, but since it would be a novelty and this is only an assemblage of clichés, the crew is out. Now, this is 1972 so we must look for someone with a foreign accent, especially anything that sounds remotely SLAVIC. But we haven't met anyone like that yet. On the other hand, among the list of cast members, we may note the name "Claude Atkins." There's a serviceable villain for you, but he's down on the ground at Anchorage.Like water, the narrative follows the quickest route downhill. The co-pilot, Mike Henry, snuggles up to the Stewardess Superior, Yvette Mimieux who is grim with worry after the warning appears: Change course for Anchorage -- or else! "Don't be afraid, Honey," he murmurs, "after all we haven't 'had fun' in Anchorage yet, have we?" Flashback: Mimieux being pushed on a swing, all sunshine and summer and flashing legs, smiling down at Henry the Pusher and calling out, "Do you know how much I love you?" Other brief flashbacks will show the now drunk and embittered Sergeant Brolin being decorated after Vietnam. Flashback to Heston and his stricken wife at lakeside: "I'm sorry. It's all over with Angela. You know that." She falls into his arms; they kiss, tears rolling down her cheeks. End of flashback.Captain Charlton Heston, nobody's fool, turns the aircraft north towards Anchorage, despite warnings of heavy weather. Now and again there are some attractive shots of a gleaming Boeing 707 slicing through the clouds. Nice sleek airplanes except that sometimes their swept-back wings wobbled alarmingly. Once the nut job outs himself, he forces Heston to fly to Moscow, where the unexpected happens -- unexpected in the sense that there is little logic behind it.It was directed by John Guillerman whose cinematic biography is checkered. He did some nice work, but then he kept pumping out turkeys like "King Kong Lives," in which I co-starred. My performance was the only memorable one. Here, he treats the big wide movie screen as if it were a small-scale television set -- zapping the camera back and forth from one terrified face to another, filling the screen with gigantic close ups of popping eyeballs and cheeks beaded with sweat. Close ups are -- or were -- traditionally used for incidents of moment but Guillerman uses them with inexcusable profligacy. In "Henry V," Lawrence Olivier pulled the camera BACK away from the speaker during important scenes. Somewhere over the Bering Sea, Mariette Hartley -- granddaughter of behaviorist John B. Watson -- chooses to give birth. Multiple close ups of her brave face sweating profusely.Heston handles the role the best he can and, as usual, he's quite good. Rock solid, one might say. The rest of the cast are all hobbled by their stereotyped roles and about half of them can't really act. The crazed hijacker is sometimes laughable.
LeonLouisRicci
Another Seventies Disaster, a Disaster Movie that Viewers Today Love to Poke Fun and some even call these Things Camp Classics. But in 1972 it was a Stinker and no Amount of Glossing Over its Inanities could make it anything more than a Boring Bunch of Passengers on board a Commercial Flight with a Former Military Pilot hoping to keep Control of "His" Airplane from a Nutjob Determined to Fill Two Hours of Screen Time with Clichéd Scene Chewing among the Clichéd People that Populate these Things.Bland, Hardly Exciting Waste of Time Watching Blurry Flashbacks that Attempt to Add Weight to the Proceedings and come off as nothing more than Sopa Opera Filler. There isn't an Interesting Character Aboard of the 100 Souls and the Tension is too Choreographed and Badly Edited to Amount to Much. This is Anything but Sure Handed Filmmaking. What's with all the Zooms to the Lipstick Counter, wouldn't One be Enough. The Movie has got no Heart and no Intrigue and Yes, it may be Laughable but at the Expense of Your Wasted Time and Trying to get Any Fun from this is Futile. It is just Plain Bad from the Awkward Beginning to the Overly Staged Ending.
bkoganbing
A decent if not spectacular entry into the Seventies disaster films is Skyjacked often confused with another airplane disaster film that starred Charlton Heston, Airport 75. This one is better than that thing from the Airport series.Susan Dey playing one of the passengers finds a note written in one of the airplane bathrooms demanding that the plane be taken to Anchorage Alaska for refueling for a trip to the then Soviet Union. The pilot is Charlton Heston the crew is co-pilot Mike Henry, navigator Ken Swofford and various stewardesses headed by Yvette Mimieux. The note says the writer has a bomb as well to enforce his demands.There's not much suspense here in that from the beginning you know it is James Brolin, the soldier so eager to get on board. What you don't know is that he's being discharged for being deranged, but we learn that just a tad too late before Brolin reveals himself and takes the plane and its passengers hostage.The best thing about Skyjacked is the duel of minds and wits between Heston and Brolin. In fact Brolin is a truly frightening individual whose instability makes him hard to control and his combat skills and weaponry make him deadly.Speaking of the weaponry, note that Brolin takes it on board the plane as a carry on in his duffel bag. Thanks to 9/11 we've certainly beefed up security so that at least that could never happen now in that way.Skyjacked is not the best of the Seventies disaster films, but it holds up reasonably well for today's audience.
mazinman-1
I stumbled on this movie on TCM one slow afternoon and was surprised I never heard of it with so many big names in the cast. I can see why the director, John Guillermin, didn't do anything substantial after this lame duck. Even the most rudimentary aviation credibility is lost in this film, from the ridiculous flying skills obviously exaggerated for the movie, to the laughable aviation radio-speak, and finally the cockpit not even close to resembling anything like a Boeing 707.The plot is full of holes large enough to fly a 707 through. Like the Soviet fighters didn't know the airliner was 'civilian' until Charlton Heston drops the landing gear. Huh? Does anyone know how many miles it is from Anchorage to Moscow? Almost 4500! And I didn't even know James Brolin could over-act to this degree. I could go on and on but won't.My tolerance for 1970's disaster movies is fairly high but this movie is totally intolerable to the point of laughable. And what's with the flashbacks?! Did the script mandate all the profanity and silly dialogue? It's almost as though the director wanted to make "an adult film" and used profanity to prove the point.
