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user\nThe Concorde ... Airport '79 starts in Washington where a man named Carl Parker (Macon (McCalman) contacts high profile TV news reporter Maggie Whelan (Susan Blakely) in order to hand secret documents over that prove his boss Kevin Harriosn (Robert Wagner) owner & president of Harrison Industries that develop weapons for the military has been illegally selling said weapons to foreign countries. However Maggie sees Carl assassinated & she barely escapes with her life, Maggie is to catch the Concorde to Moscow via Paris the next morning & intends to blow the whistle on Harrison who also happens to be her boyfriend which would ruin him. Determined to save himself he reprogrammes his hi-tech 'Buzzard' homing missile to intercept & destroy the Concorde during a test run killing all those on-board & destroying the documented evidence...
Renamed Airport '80 - The Concorde for it's cinema & initial home video releases because it was released here in, well, 1980 rather than 1979 this last entry in the Airport franchise was directed by David Lowell Rich & is a notoriously bad film that was apparently laughed at during press & test screenings prompting Universal to promote the film as an action comedy. The first thing to say is that The Concorde ... Airport '79 is a really silly & downright daft film but on a purely entertainment basis I can think of a lot worse films to spend 108 minutes watching, I really can. I quite liked the absurd plot about a wealthy industrialist wanting to kill his girlfriend TV reporter before she can expose him as an illegal arms dealer but this guy doesn't do subtle & decides the best way to do it is to blow Concorde up with his own guided missile & then gets a Fench fighter pilot to try & shoot it down before finally sabotaging it so really there's three mini disaster flicks in one here as each time super pilot Joe Patroni manages to save the day. You know Joe Patroni played by George Kennedy appears in all four Airport films & goes from mechanic in the first to Concorde pilot extrodinaire in this, also I reckon he's a bit of a jinx since in the space of nine years he has been involved with four major aviation disasters. I think the real reason why the Airport series stopped here was because Patroni retired after this & the jinx was lifted. Some of the things that happen here are just silly, Patroni does barrel rolls, flies upside-down & out manoeuvre's a guided missile in a huge Concorde not to mention he crash lands it & fires flare guns out of his window to destroy the missile all while keeping a calm head. This guy is good, very good. Then there's the character's, there's a Saxophone playing black dude who smokes weed in the toilets, an old woman with a bladder problem & a team of Russian gymnasts with bad accents. Also, despite being almost shot down with a missile & then attacked by a Jet fighter the passengers of Concorde don't seem that bothered & happily get back aboard the following day, I don't know about you but after that I would probably find a safer way to travel & why do the police or authorities not question anyone? Why is the Concorde captain Patroni allowed to just go off & sleep with a French prostitute? The Concorde ... Airport '79 certainly isn't boring & is full of memorable moments & I was entertained in a way although it's far from a good film & modern audiences may not have the patience with it, hell I liked it for what it was in a daft way but it's no sort of classic.
Even though Concorde no longer flies it's still quite a cool looking air-plane & there's plenty of footage of it here, the one used in The Concorde ... Airport '79 was the seventh one built. This Concorde was also the same aircraft which crashed after a tire bust caused a fuel tank to rupture and the leaking fuel catch fire on July 25th 2000, while taking off in Paris sadly resulting in the death of 109 passengers and crew on board and 4 people on the ground. When this aired on TV in the US in 1982 almost twenty minutes of new footage was included with most if not all of it being newly shot over two years after the original production had finished. I know the effects here take a bashing from most but I don't reckon they are too bad, when you consider this was made in the late 70's I think they come across quite well. The camera moves during effects shots, real footage of real planes is used rather than toy models which in my opinion would have looked a lot worse & I could certainly see what the makers were trying to do with limited funds & limited technology. In a strange way they are quite impressive actually without ever looking that good if you know what I mean. Probably the most action packed of all the Airport films there's missiles, exploding planes, daring crash landings, assassinations & a guy named Robert Palmer (no, not the singer) giving head a woman in a jacuzzi.
The IMDb says this had a budget of about $14,000,000 which is actually more than I thought, maybe those special effects aren't so impressive after all. Shot in Utah, Washington, Los Angeles & France. The acting isn't great here, people don't look worried enough that they are about to die. Goerge Kennedy gets some bad one-liners while Robert Wagner plays the bad guy.
The Concorde ... Airport '79 is fun for bad film enthusiasts everywhere & to be brutally honest I rather watch this entertaining mess of a film than some two hour Oscar nominated bore.
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