When international terrorist Charles Rane (Bruce Payne) is arrested, he is placed on a commercial flight to face charges. What his FBI minders do not know is that Rane's comrades are also onboard.
After they take over the plane, Rane and his lackeys have to deal with an unexpected obstacle - another passenger who happens to be the airline's new security specialist, John Cutter (Wesley Snipes).
It is amazing how your opinion of a movie can change. Sometimes it just takes time. Or a lockdown.
I reviewed Passenger 57 a couple of years ago for a feature on 'Die Hard on a... ' action flicks, and I do not remember being that excited about it. I remember catching it on TV once when I was a kid, but on re-watching the film for the article, I was a bit underwhelmed. Coming off of Blade and Snipes' other action vehicles, I was surprised at how small-scale it was - the plane is a regular commercial airliner, and a lot of the action takes place on the ground, a deviation from the Die Hard template that I held against it in the ‘Die Hard on a…’ article.
Passenger 57 recently popped up on Netflix, and I gave it another shot. Time has been kind because this movie is great.
So many movies nowadays are 2-2.5 hours long, and feature world-destroying villains and computer-generated set pieces. Compared with those lumbering Disneysaurs, Passenger 57 is spry and unpretentious.
This movie is 84 minutes long. Not 184 minutes. 84. I cannot emphasise how much I love this.
It starts, blasts through the bare essentials of character and plot set up, and then we are into the action. While it does not boast the frenetic editing of action films from later in the decade, Passenger 57 moves at a good clip with no dead spots.
And while the movie is smaller in scale than comparable films like Air Force One and Executive Decision, I enjoyed the juxtaposition of a banal domestic flight with the struggle between the OTT terrorist and Snipes’ action hero.
I had dismissed the fairground set piece in my earlier review, but as with the plane, I really enjoyed how straightforward it is - Rane is doing what almost no villain in a ‘Die Hard on a’ movie does: attempting to escape. He only ends up ducking it out with Cutter at the fairground because he is trying to hijack a car in the parking lot. There is no dastardly scheme - he just needs an escape vehicle.
The one aspect of the film that I bump up against is the way the filmmakers present Cutter's escape as the initial hijacking takes place.
Cutter is in the bathroom when the hijacking takes place, and he sneaks out to watch the action go down and grab the plane phone. Script-wise, this works fine. But with the way it is shot, it always looks like Snipes is in full view of the terrorists. Another element that I noticed was the absence of noise from the engines. He makes so much noise when the terrorists are so close it just comes off really strange.
That is really the only part of the movie that does not work for me - I do not usually go in for Cinema Sins-style 'logic gaps', but in this sequence, the filmmaking choices threw me out for a minute.
What really elevates Passenger 57 are the performances by the leads.
As Charles Rane, Bruce Payne is playing the usual cliche Euro-trash villain, but he leans into the character’s most despicable attributes so much it feels like a commentary on the ubiquity of Euro-trash villains in Hollywood action movies.
This movie would still not work however without Wesley Snipes. When he enters the movie, it feels like everything is revolving around him. He is so charismatic I could not believe this was his first action movie.
In some ways, this movie feels like the first chapter in a franchise - Snipes is super-charismatic, has plenty of one-liners and even introduces himself as 'Cutter, John Cutter’, like he is an established character. He is also responsible for all the major turns the movie takes, from forcing the plane to land to foiling Rane’s attempted escape at the fairground. He even does a forward roll before killing a sniper a million miles away.
While Snipes has kept his hand in the genre since, it is a pity that he never brought John Cutter back to the screen. Here is hoping the numbers on Netflix are big enough to convince some executive to green light Passenger 58.
You can read the article I reference at the start of this review here.
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