Wow! Such a good movie.

Fresh and Exciting

As Good As It Gets

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

The final film in the Airport series resorts to risqué humour and implausible villainy. The photography of Concorde, a British-French turbojet-powered supersonic passenger airliner, is impressive. It's understandable producers would see Concorde as the new and sensational staging for a disaster. George Kennedy takes the lead role in proceedings, and frankly, for a man of his talents, and credit to the series, he deserved a better script. With less of a stellar cast we are left with an empty vessel - a contrived plot and below par acting. The adventure is drab because it is filmed with the kind of simplicity associated with an episodic television drama. It's not the special effects that impedes suspense but the lack of storyboarding and direction. Antecedent films had scale, but Airport '79 has a stub of an ending with screen curtains pulled across quickly as if the writer had given up. The audience deserved better for sticking with it. In fact, the scene was set for a potentially original finale with a new form of danger, and escape.

In the beginning, there was darkness. Then someone flipped a switch, the projectors came on, and the first "Airport" movie filled the screen...many, many times, all over the world. They made it for $10 million and it earned $100 million. And the people wanted MORE! Fortunately, the producers still had more to give so they released Airport 1975. It wasn't as good as the first one, but it was still a decent-enough movie. And the people wanted MORE! The producers still had an adventure left in them so they release Airport 77...which wasn't quite as good as the first two, but it was still decent enough...And the people wanted MORE! The producers had nothing left to give - no more grand gestures or heroic feats lived within them, at least when it came to movies about ill-fated airliners - but you have to give the people what they want..so they gave us this. This...ridiculous...thing. It had the desired effect: we didn't want any more Airport movies after that. This movie is terrible. There's no getting around it. This thing is full of intentionally bad acting - it has to be intentional because the cast is full of very good actors. The premise is ridiculous. The "special effects" are something you'd see in a high-school play. It is obvious they intended to make the worst movie in history, and nearly succeeded. "Manos, the Hands of Fate" is still worse but not by much.Fortunately for us all, the sequels "Airplane!" and "Snakes on a Plane" are of much higher quality.

Fourth and final film in this series is truly a crash and burn disaster in itself. Ridiculous plot has the Concorde being threatened by an irate businessman trying to stop his newscaster girlfriend( a passenger on the Concorde) from going on air with irrefutable proof that he was illegally selling weapons to enemy regimes, making him a traitor. Naturally, he decides that destroying the very high-profile Concorde plane undertaking an international flight before the Olympic Games in Russia is the perfectly logical course of action to take...(sure!) Not even the presence of George Kennedy as familiar character Joe Patroni(now a pilot on the Concorde) can save it. Just awful.

All the entries in the 70's disaster movie franchise "Airport" – a total of four movies spread over one decade – have been chastised by critics as well as regular action movie fanatics for being too grotesque and ludicrous. Me, personally, I liked the three previous installments a lot, but I can't but admit that the swan song in the series is a completely laughable effort. The supposedly adrenalin-rushing script is absurd, the stereotypical characters are cartoonish, the acting performances are wooden and the action sequences are downright hilarious. The set-up and plot of "The Concorde" is faithful to the previous movies. We have a cast full of acclaimed names, often in inferior little roles, and a screenplay that brings together pretty much everything that can go wrong on an intercontinental flight. The prestigious Concorde aircraft is ready to fly from New York to Paris and then onwards towards Moscow in celebration of the 1980 Olympics. One of the passengers is the female journalist Maggie Whelan, who's in possession of some important evidence that will unmask her ex-fiancée Kevin Harrison as an illegal weapon dealer. It's most vital for him that Maggie never reaches Moscow and thus he tries to kill her, as well as the rest of the Concorde passengers and crew, subsequently through nuclear missiles and sabotage. Luckily for the passengers, the Concorde has two of the world's biggest macho men behind the steering wheel with the French Captain Paul Metrand and the American veteran pilot Joe Patroni. "The Concorde: Airport 79" is a dumb and fairly pathetic film, but fortunately enough it remains amusing and never bores for one second. The sight of an hi-tech advanced airplane making loops in order to evade missiles is definitely bad in an entertaining way and the hammy performances of A-list stars are fun to observe as well. Particularly Robert Wagner is tremendous as the villain. With his straight face and eloquent monologues, he represents the prototype of Bond-movie villains and I strongly suspect that Mike Myers hired him to play Number Two in the Austin Powers' movie solely based on his performance here. Alain Delon looks quite bored and soft-erotica star Sylvia "Emmanuelle" Kristel is rather unnoticeable when she keeps her clothes on. Fun bloke George Kennedy is the only actor who appeared in all four of the "Airport" movies, so it's truly a shame that he plays his biggest role in the worst of the series. The dialogs are lame and some of the clichéd sub plots are horrendous (does there really have to be an emergency donor organ transport in every disaster movie?), but I certainly didn't regret the two hours of my life that I wasted on watching this film.