Cinema
Air Force One (15, selected cinemas)
Remember your morals
Mark Steyn
What is it we want in a head of state? It's something Her Majesty's subjects have been asking in the last week, though mostly (as far as this one is concerned) in an utter- ly repugnant fashion. Still, the answer seems reasonably clear: Queen Oprah.
For Americans, after five years under an Oprah in drag, that isn't enough. So each summer Hollywood releases movies about the kind of chief of state they'd really like. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, but celluloid presidents have to be from both — adept at the Clintonesque touchy-feely stuff, but also willing to kick butt; they start off feeling your pain, and end up causing it. Thus, in last year's Inde- pendence Day, when President Bill Pull- man's strategy of talking the aliens to death comes to naught, he gets in touch with his masculine side, climbs into the cockpit and takes off to zap the space invaders himself. In Air Force One, President Harrison Ford starts by giving a speech in Moscow and doing his best Robin Cook impersonation: `Never again will I allow our national self- interest to deter us from doing what is morally right'; by the time it's over, he's shot dead several terrorists; cunningly spo- ken fluent Russian to them; taught himself to fly the jet and dodge MiG fighters; hung off the edge of the plane's open parachute bay, clinging on by his fingernails; hung off the edge of the parachute bay a second time, with the added complication of being locked in mortal combat with a Kazakh ter- rorist leader while snarling through clenched teeth, 'Get. Off. My. Plane.' Poor old Clinton, by contrast, can't speak Rus- sian, can't fly jets, can't hang off planes, can't even walk down the stairs at Greg Norman's house without stumbling and putting himself out of commission for six weeks. On the other hand, the President who asked the Supreme Court to delay Paula Jones's sexual harassment suit because it would distract him from the bur- dens of office — somehow found time to see Air Force One twice, in between his other onerous duties of recent weeks: installing a White House hot tub, playing golf with the basketball superstar Michael Jordan and attending celebrity parties for three weeks on Martha's Vineyard.
Wolfgang Peterson begins his film with a joint Russo-American commando raid against Kazakhstani strongman General Radek, a born-again commie. But, after a celebratory banquet in Moscow, little does Harrison Ford suspect that an elite terror- ist squad has inveigled itself on to his presi- dential jet. He ought to have suspected because the chief Kazakhwhacko is Britain's Gary Oldman, who plays the vil- lain in at least 80 per cent of Hollywood movies these days and who here carries the additional tell-tale signs of a goatee and an even riper accent than he used for Dracula. Soon the Kazakhs are seizing the plane, killing or capturing everyone, except, curi- ously enough, the President. A desperate Secret Service detail hustles him into the one-man 'escape pod', abandoning his wife and Chelsea-like daughter but much to the relief of Vice-President Glenn Close back in Washington.
`He ran from here like a veeped dog,' jeers Oldman. Over in the White House, the dogged Veep Glenn Close ponders constitutional authority and orders the Air Force to retrieve Harrison Ford's escape pod. When they do, it proves to be empty: the veeped dog has decided to stay on the jet, as a lounge-suited guerrilla hiding out in the baggage hold and round the back of the mini-bar, plotting to take back his plane. Ford does his best to look as if turn- ing from a speechifying chief exec to a kick-ass combat warrior is a hasty bit of improvisation: for the first half of the movie he spends much of his time sticking his head nervously up from hatches like the groundhog in Groundhog Day. But, in the end, Harrison Ford is Harrison Ford. The film would have had more tension if they'd cast Gerald Ford.
There's another problem, too. It's impos- sible, watching the scenes of candle-light vigils at the White House and comparing them with the real thing on the news bul- letins, not to be aware of how desperately synthetic the whole thing is. The conflicting tugs between Ford's duties as head of state and as a husband and father ring especially hollow: you know from the beginning that the film has no serious intention of killing off his wife or child. Real life, as we know, is not so respectful of formula. But Ford's slick middle-aged comic-book is part of Hollywood's remorseless and self-defeating desensitising of its own audience. For most of the story, Air Force One (the jet) is on autopilot. So is Air Force One (the film).
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