This is one of those films that feature an airplane hijacking where the terrorist want money, lots of money! Of course, pretty sure the only place this scenario happens is in movies or in this case television movies because what would be the point of murdering people to get your point across when all that is going to do is make you more wanted and hunted than if you like embezzle some money or go through the backdoor in a computer program to steal some money. Like all films of this type we get stars that are billed higher in the cast than others and the ones at the top literally do nothing compared to those lower on the cast list!
The story, a convicted murder is put on a plane of people just wanting to head to their locale. He is deadly, a known killer so lets assign two people to guard him and lets put him in the same cabin as everyone else. Well he has friends, because murders always work together so they can hold people hostage and so he is freed and he wants to head to Dallas and he wants 20 million in bonds for the lives of the people. Just give him the damn things, not like they are untraceable assets, I think you can even render them useless if you want. No, they just have elaborate plans, besides the terrorist is an idiot and literally lets a passenger talk him into releasing half the passengers. Should of offered him muffins, he may have let the whole lot of them go!
The casting is what you would expect. We have James Brolin looking quite disinterested and Michael Grossman who looks only mildly more interested than Charles. You get the gun toting lunatic of the Police Academy films playing a lunatic Vietnam vet afraid of flying, you have Anthony Michael Hall playing the terrorist in a very unconvincing manner and Ally Sheedy is a gym teacher who also is a hostage negotiator or something...
The film is your standard television movie fare where there is not enough in the budget to have a standard plane crash, plus you had to pay those stars to kind of just sit there! Then you have the terrorist who really are dumb and obviously don't think things through. Ask yourself, have you ever seen anyone get away with a crime like this? Well, they did in the movie Quick Change, but that group was led by Bill Murry, not the geeky member of the brat pack!
