Turbulence 2: Fear of Flying

A group of freighted passengers, some superficial individual dramatic situations, terrorists, pilot and cabin crew killed or sick, an alert and smart passenger that has never piloted a plane (but knows a lot about planes), a helpful lady, a doctor, some torture and murders, plane with very few fuel, enough just for one trial of landing the aircraft, happy end for the survivals, a beginning of a love (sealed by a kiss) between the smart passenger that saved the survivals and the helpful lady… How many times have we, simple viewers, faced this screenplay? Turbulence 2 is exactly the same. Craig Sheffer has a horrible acting and Tom Berenger, who is a good actor, performs a secondary role in a very forgettable movie. Spending your time watching this flick is pure waste of time. My vote is four.

...absolutely, bar none. At best corny and clichéd, at worst insulting to my intelligence. For example; when the baddie throws a passenger out of a 747 door whilst flying above the airport, on a stormy night, just to prove a point, the body just happens to fall through the glass roof of the control tower where the team are negotiating with the hijacker. 'nuff said. I feel sorry for the original audiences that will never regain those wasted couple of hours and bemused by anyone who would actually go out and spend money on the DVD. I see in the voting that some people actually gave this a 10? Presumably the director, crew and assorted family.

As part of a Fear Of Flying class, a group of passengers are assigned to a flight to help them get over their fears. Among the passengers are aeronautic engineer Martin Messerman and new couple Elliott and Jessica. However, when the passengers start to fall asleep, it is clear that someone has drugged them somehow – a fear that is proven to be correct when it turns out that a man has a deadly virus on board and is willing to use it. Can Martin overcome his fears and use his knowledge of planes to stop the virus being released? Well take a flipping guess! Baring nothing in common with the original Turbulence apart from the theme of a hijacked plane, this film was screened in the UK under its numbered title and not it's IMDb listed title. Why this happened is beyond me because I can't understand why this film wouldn't want to try and ride on the back of another film (even a film as poor as Turbulence) – God knows it isn't good enough to stand on its own. The plot lacks any sort of logic and merely hopes that, if it keeps the pace up, that nobody will notice that the 'hostages' seem to have free run of the plane, or that the guns never breach the skin of the plane, or that the 'terrorist's plot' doesn't make any sense whatsoever. The TV series 24 manages to do this (cover plot holes with pace and noise) but this film cannot manage it mainly because the holes are far too big and the tension far too loose. Instead it just throws yet another average or poor plot twist after another and it all gets tiresome long before it ends. The production also feels a lot cheaper – the internals look very much like a soundstage and the externals are all a normal plane shot from different angles to make it look like it is stricken, flying up, flying down etc. At least the original Turbulence looked like somebody had spent money on it (even if it was money wasted). The script is as poor as the basic plot. The various twists are silly and the script just keeps on doing the same things over and over again to no great effect while the actors all spout dialogue that is meant to be amusing (it falls flat) or dramatic (it sounds hackneyed). Sheffer is no leading man and he is poor at the start but gets better – maybe if the material hadn't been so bad then he would have been better. Beals is supposed to be simmering and sexy but is neither although she does have an OK chemistry with Sheffer. Why Berenger chose to do this film is beyond me but this is yet another in a bagful of nails that he seems determined to hammer into his career's coffin. Nordling is OK but can barely keep a straight face in some of his scenes while all the rest of the cast just fall into the various airplane cliché roles. Overall this is not an awful film – it is just a typically poor video thriller made on the cheap without any great imagination or effort put in. At best it is watchable and at worst it shows a real contempt for its audience with some things just being stupid as much as they are illogical. I was drawn in by the interest value of this being a sequel to a film I had seen but it had almost nothing in common with that film apart from the plane thing and neither of them being any good! If you want a cheap video thriller then this is no worse than some others I have seen – but this film makes Turbulence look like a good option, and that is not a good thing to say.

I don't have much to say about this turkey except to watch for one incredible sequence with the terrorist contacting the control tower. The Tower gives the terrorist the usual talk about no negotiations. The terrorist decides he has to show that he means business. But how? His solution? Start tossing people out of the plane. An effective plan right? But that is not enough for this terrorist. He also wants to send a message to the control tower, to express his outrage at their non-cooperation. So, the terrorist opens the hatch and holds his selected victim inches away from doom. Then, as the plane flies over the airport, he carefully and judiciously calculates wind speed, vector problems, and trajectory so that when he drops the poor sap, the body will rip into the Control Tower like a missile. What a math wizard, he does this all on the fly without aid of a calculator.

Turbulence 2: Fear Of Flying was on cable last night and I loved it. A passenger on a flight of people with fears of flying reveals himself as a terrorist and hijacks the plane, two of the passenger's "fears" magically disappear and they become hostages-come-action-heroes. By the way, Turbulence 2 is a sequel in name only to the 1997 clunker Turbulence. Craig Sheffer (from TV's teen drama One Tree Hill) and Jennifer Beals (remember her from Flashdance?) soon scheme against the "terrorists" (if you can call them that, they're that inept) and a few plot convolutions later, Sheffer has to land the plane himself. SPOILERS (but if you've seen any of these "plane" movies before, it isn't really a big issue...) After they land the plane with some help via radio, the movie amounts to a really weak ending, and the evil terrorist's death isn't satisfying at all. (stabbing himself with his own weapon... what the hell is that??) I think part of this movie's appeal is the great team Sheffer and Beals make. If this movie's on TV late one night, then I suggest you check it out, at least...

The first Turbulence movie really reeked (ie. it stunk out the whole cabin), mostly because there were large portions of the movie where nothing much exciting happened. They fixed this problem for Turbulence 2 with wall-to-wall non-stop heart-pounding action. OK, the action isn't heart-pounding but it's certainly wall-to-wall. There's always somebody fighting, running away, chasing, blowing something up, shooting, dying, trying to escape or, of course, flying the plane in turbulent conditions. Oh yeah, and falling... The wall-to-wall action is flanked closely on both sides with wall-to-wall stupidity, but to its credit the movie does not take itself too seriously. How could it? A fear of flying group takes a ride in a plane with a bunch of terrorists with a bomb on board which then heads towards a storm. Ha ha, yeah right. Now, it's up to the fear of flying passengers & crew to save the day which they do with varying degrees of success. When ANOTHER crew member gets shot attempting to overthrow the bad guy the bad guy says something along the lines of "Aargh! what's wrong with you people?". It's delivered beautifully. Actually, the acting in general is really very, err, well capable. I was going to say good, but in the context of this movie it wouldn't quite fit. I'm only giving this movie 4/10, but it's a fun 4/10. Chill that beer, microwave that popcorn, hand over your $2 to the video shop, switch off brain, press play, enjoy.

The plot of this film is just so preposterous it makes "Airplane!" look like a slice of gritty realism. Nervous flyers on a plane in a terrible storm with evil European terrorists (no clue as to what their cause was, other than "being evil"), deadly nerve gases, dead cabin crew, drugged ice cubes, gun fights, a missile attack, and an ordinary Joe who has to land the plane (he has a dead wife, and an impossibly cute little son, of course). As the action lurched from this implausible random plot twist to that piece of clunky, cliche-ridden dialogue, I found myself being charmed by the sheer awfulness of it all. My favourite part is when a terrorist starts babbling in Czech, and Jennifer Beals offers to try and interpret since she learned a few words of Polish from her Grandmother as a child. Seconds later she is in full swing: "He says that there is a deadly nerve gas in the hold, and he will press the detonator killing everyone within a 5 mile radius"....Whatever did her grandmother talk about all the time that she picked up that vocabulary?

"Fear of Flying: Turbulence II" does not pretend to be anything it is not. It is simply a formula airline-that-must-be-brought-down-by-passenger-taking-direction-from-the-ground-whilst-sitting-in-pilots-seat-where-said-pilot-is (insert one):dead/predisposed/poisoned etc. This runs along the lines of the great 70's era tragedy films like Airport '77, Towering Inferno and the like. "Fear" has plotted this along that very formula, so much so that the inevitable hero of the movies son races out onto the tarmac as the inevitable plane is safely guided to the ground at the climactic ending with music crescendoing and you knew this would happen all along. So what? I cannot deny I was truly entertained. The dialogue was humorous-intentional at times- and I did find myself and colleagues arguing about who the actual terrorists were on the flight through out the film-is it him? No, it's gotta be him! Of all the critically acclaimed movies I have seen, this one is not by far, but it is fondly remembered. Kill an hour and a half or so with this.

Now and then one of those wonderful films comes along that is so terrible it's good. It's no small feat to maintain such disregard for reality, such outrageous inconsistencies, so many factual clangers and to tell the story with so many awful lines. I especially enjoyed "We're all gonna die." Not to mention the bonking in the lavatory. Hell I find it hard to brush my teeth in one of those things let alone commit adultery.It would be easier in a Volkswagen. This film is so unrelently ghastly that I enjoyed it immensely. Not just bad. Ghastly! It's not a likely candidate for an in flight movie but it should be. Nobody on board any aircraft anywhere would ever believe anything in it.

** review may contain mild spoilers ** I saw this film on television recently. Because its subject matter is evocative of the 9/11 attacks (despite being filmed two years prior) and our current terrorism fears, it held my interest longer than I expected it would. But to be sure, in the genre of thrillers this is a "C" movie--definitely not in the "must-see" category. If you are looking for action and suspense, this movie has a little bit of both, but you will have to accept a lot of unrealistic plot details along the way. Indeed, by the end of the movie the cumulative effect of the scarcely believable plot and the uninspired dialogue had me chuckling inside. If you like to laugh at mediocrity, then this movie might do the trick for you. The performances are decent at times, but mostly forgettable. Flashdance's Jennifer Beals, who plays the heroine, and Jody Thompson, a young female passenger in a minor role, are not bad to look at. Unfortunately, for most of the film they are just shrinking in horror as helpless hostages. Tom Berenger, who plays the villain, does a passable job of Cain-raising as an off-his-rocker terrorist, but his character more often strikes the viewer as silly and stupid rather than scary. Craig Sheffer delivers a bland performance as the hero, a former airplane pilot who became a technician/engineer after a flying accident and now has a chance to redeem himself. Plain-looking techies don't usually make good leading men, and Sheffer's Martin Messerman is no exception. There are few chances for the actors to shine, as the dialogue that they must recite vacillates between the trite and the ridiculous. And the character development is thin, so there's not much depth or motivation underlying the actions of the major players. There is too little chemistry between the lead actors to provide much fulfillment at the end of their shared experience. The film's few attempts at humor are pathetically unfunny, although many other lines that were not intended to be funny may elicit laughs for their absurdity. Some of the unbelievable moments in the film have been already mentioned. I will add a few more. As in many films, the villain never can bring himself to kill the person who poses the greatest threat to his mission, despite the inherent logic of that act. Also, the plane is supposed to be flying amid severe atmospheric turbulence throughout (consistent with the title), but for long stretches in the middle of the movie, all rocky movement seems to cease as far as the passengers are concerned. And the toxic agent is alternately described as nerve gas and then anthrax. The movie includes lots of technical details related to 747's that seem to slow down the story without adding much useful realism. Some airline industry consultants are named in the credits at the end, so apparently the script was vetted by knowledgeable people, but that fact makes the scientifically doubtful moments even less excusable. If you must see an airplane thriller, see Air Force One. If you've already seen Air Force One, the Airport, Airplane!, and Die Hard series are all superior to this clunker.