From: L-Bueno@cup.portal.com (Louis Alberto Bueno)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies
Subject: 'PASSENGER 57': IS THIS TRIP NECESSARY?
Date: Sun,  8 Nov 92 20:50:40 PST
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Distribution: world

`PASSENGER 57': IS THIS TRIP NECESSARY?
By Kenneth Turan
(c) 1992, Los Angeles Times 11/05

	   As good an actor as Wesley Snipes is - and it is hard to think
of many better - he still isn't good enough to save ``Passenger 57.'' How
could he be? Though it is refreshing to see an actor of color playing a
straight-up action hero, and though Snipes' performance gives this film
considerably more kick than it would have had otherwise, it remains a
standard issue thriller, dutifully going where its betters have gone
before.
	    Like its more polished ``Die Hard'' predecessors, ``Passenger
57'' (rated R for violence and language) deals with terror in the skies and
how one tough hombre takes on the kind of maniacal wretch who considers
killing 60 people to create a distraction all in a day's work.
	    Unlike ``Die Hard,'' however, the creative team of ``Passenger
57,'' from director Kevin Hooks to screenwriters David Loughery and Dan
Gordon to producer Lee Rich, all have backgrounds that are heavy on the TV
side, and it shows. From its abbreviated 84-minute length to its
indifferent and confusing plotting to its tepid acting, ``Passenger 57''
plays like a cookie-cutter ``Movie of the Week,'' dead set against anything
that so much as hints at originality.
	   The major exception to this, obviously, is Wesley Snipes, who,
as everything from ``New Jack City'' to ``Waterdance'' has shown, is
incapable of an indifferent performance. Whenever Snipes is on the screen,
energetically snapping necks as well as wisecracks like ``Always bet on
black,'' ``Passenger 57'' is more diverting than it has any right to be,
but even he is no match for the film's determined ordinariness.
	    Snipes plays John Cutter, perhaps the world's top
anti-terrorism operative, a man who knows both what to do during an
airplane hijacking and just how to do it. But rather than being out there
fighting the good fight, Cutter, nursing a personal trauma, has ``taken
himself out of the game.'' Instead he passes the time teaching feisty
stewardesses like Marti Slayton (Alex Datcher) how to handle terrorists and
biting her pretty little head off when she muffs the job.
	    While Cutter is losing his temper, Charles Rane (British actor
Bruce Payne) is getting captured by a heavily armed SWAT team. If villainy
were an Olympic sport, this cool psychopath, archly nicknamed ``the Rane of
Terror'' and apparently the victim of a rather nasty childhood he can't
bear to have anyone mention, would be a shoo-in for the gold. When he says
``sit down, shut up or be killed,'' he is not just making conversation.
	    After burning some incense and doing the kind of Oriental
meditation all deadly karate experts have a weakness for, Cutter decides to
get back into the swing of things by taking a job as head of security for
the mythical Atlantic International airlines. And, in the kind of
coincidence that would cause coronaries in Las Vegas, he ends up sharing a
plane with not only that attractive stewardess, but also a heavily guarded
Charles Rane as well. As a crew member innocently puts it, ``I have a
feeling this is going to be a very interesting flight.''
	    The problem with ``Passenger 57'' (rated R for violence and
language) is that the flight does not turn out to be all that interesting.
Neither in the air nor in a pointless stopover on the ground does anything
happen that arouses more than an entry-level of excitement. Add to this a
certain sloppiness (just for openers, no one even bothers to tell us who
passenger 57 is) and you end up with a film that does not exactly crackle
with excitement. So when a character says, ``You'd think they'd put an
airline hijacker on a bus or a train,'' it's hard not to agree that maybe
that would have been a better idea all the way around.

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`PASSENGER 57': STUCK IN COACH
By Hal Hinson
(c) 1992, The Washington Post 11/06

	   WASHINGTON - ``Passenger 57'' is an airplane hijacking movie
that attempts to present its star, Wesley Snipes, as a combination of Bruce
Lee and Bruce Willis. It's a kung-fu ``Die Hard'' picture, and, frankly,
just plain silly.
	   The movie turns around Snipes, who plays an airline security
adviser and karate expert who just happens to be on board when a terrorist
gang takes over the plane to free its sinister leader (Bruce Payne), who is
being escorted to jail by the FBI.
	   What a coincidence!
	   The movie is predictable, with Snipes overcoming only about as
many impossible odds as your average superhero. And, of course, while
remaining forever super-cool.
	   Snipes has never really turned in a bad performance before, and
he's not bad here. It's just that he's the wrong actor for this part. He
does everything right, even down to his Dirty Harry-style wisecracks, but
he never looks comfortable.
	   Next time, if director Kevin Hooks wants to turn someone into an
action hero, he might try an actor who's more comfortable working in one
dimension. This one keeps looking for something plausible and real to play,
and can't find it. The trick is to cast someone who doesn't care, and
that's not Snipes.
	   - - -

	   Passenger 57 is rated PG-13.

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HUNTER ON FILM: `PASSENGER 57' IS HOLLOW, CLICHED HIJACK THRILLER
By Stephen Hunter
(c) 1992, The Baltimore Sun 11/06

	   Wesley Snipes is such a singular, riveting presence on screen it
seems a shame to waste him on something as generic as ``Passenger 57.''
It's like putting Anthony Hopkins or Al Pacino in an Alpo commercial!
	   The R-rated hijack thriller is cobbled together out of pieces of
other movies that, generally, weren't any good either. It's strictly a
for-the-dollars and by-the-numbers money machine.
	   Snipes plays some kind of vaguely defined ``security expert''
who is haunted by guilt because he tried to stop a holdup at a convenience
store and only succeeded in getting his wife killed. Thus he's the
traditional thriller hero, the exiled Achilles sulking in his tent, drawn
back into battle by the importunings of lesser men.
	   At last agreeing to become the head of security for an
international airline, he's flying to L.A. (in coach!) when, by
coincidence, he finds himself on a flight with the notorious terrorist
Charles Rane, recently and bloodily captured by the FBI. The Rane
character, an icy Brit aristocrat who enjoys issuing little ironic
drolleries before he blows people away, is clearly modeled on Alan
Rickman's devastatingly funny turn in the same role in ``Die Hard.'' But
actor Bruce Payne just isn't up to it; his terrorist is a dim, conventional
presence with no quirks that make him engaging.
	   The movie never labors with any intensity to create a sense of
reality; the details are all missing, and things happen in the screenplay
by David Loughery and Dan Gordon simply because if they didn't, there would
be no movie at all. The film has no subtext, no interesting little quirks;
it's milled from the alloy of cliche and expectations.
	   It so happens that Rane's terrorist unit (politics unspecified;
why not make them South Africans and give the movie an interesting buzz?)
has quickly infiltrated the airline and hijacks the plane. By another
oafish coincidence, Snipes is in the bathroom when the action goes down. He
emerges to wage a guerrilla war in the confines of the airliner against the
hijackers and Rane.
	   But director Kevin Hooks can never get much out of the
claustrophobic interior of the airplane, which seems to have more secret
passages and oddly placed doors than a puzzle palace, but almost no
personality. Remember how real the building felt in ``Die Hard''? And as
recently as six weeks ago, in ``Under Siege,'' the hijacked battleship
supplied a compelling milieu. This airliner could be a barber shop or a
cafeteria, it's so blandly imagined.
	   It doesn't help that Snipes' martial arts skills aren't nearly
as impressive as Steven Seagal's; the fights all look phony. And stock
characters - dour FBI agents, stupid Southern redneck sheriffs - bring the
level of the piece down even lower.
	   Snipes emerges pretty much unscathed, however, and his
relationship with Alex Datcher as a flight attendant gives the film just
the faintest tinge of a human core. The rest is bang bang and boom boom,
not particularly well-done.
	   Two stars.