Skyjacked (1972) Oh how we moviegoers loved our disaster movies all through the 1970's......all-star casts thrown together on airplanes, skyscrapers, cruise ships......and then subjected to crashes, fires, explosions, earthquakes, tidal waves,....and Richard Nixon.
(Okay, I personally threw in that last one, but it turned out Nixon was just as catastrophic as watching the good ship Poseidon tossed upside down......oh the humanity....)
Leave it to MGM, rapidly crumbling under the command of James "smiling cobra" Aubrey, to pump out a quick, low budget airplane disaster movie on the heel of Universal's 1970 monster hit "Airport".
"Skyjacked" benefited in three big ways......the first of the genre to take advantage of using a ripped-from-the-headlines villain -- a hijacker forcing the plane to take him to.....well, wherever he decides to go. In real life, long before our post-9-11 world of stringent security, hijackers were commandeering airplanes left and right, with Cuba usually their preferred destination. This happened so often, 'take-this-plane-to-Cuba' hijackings became punchlines for stand-up comedians.
Second big plus......the presence of Moses-Ben Hur himself, Charlton Heston as the clenched jaw pilot contending with planeful of hysterical passengers and a mad, mad, mad, mad hijacker. As cheap and slapped together as this movie looks, Heston's carved-in-granite gravitas makes you believe you're viewing a multi-million dollar epic.
Third bonus......the film's direction fell to to the highly efficient John Giulllermin, one of those British Field Marshall directors put in charge of massive projects one of, Her Majesty's Movie Traffic Managers.....(he'd go on to co-direct 1974's "The Towering Inferno" and the 1976 "King Kong" remake)
Given the spitball script and a made-for-TV movie cast of familiar faces, Guillermin keeps things moving right along, with the exception of some dopey, clumsy scenes shoe-horned into the film - romantic flashbacks for Heston and the mad, mad, mad , mad hijacker's delirious fantasies.
Ah yes, let us now get to Mr. Hijack.....played by journeyman TV hunk James Brolin. He appears to be an Army combat veteran driven utterly bonkers enough to seek asylum and glory in.....Soviet Russia. You heard that correctly, this bug-eyed loony tune wants the plane flown to Moscow, where he dreams of a hero's welcome.....heh, heh, heh.
No need to go on with any further plot machinations.......the real fun here comes from the early 1970's renditions of airline travel.....
No TSA pat-downs or X-ray scanning.......feel free to smoke on the plane: Heston fills up the cockpit with clouds of pipe tobacco, and speaking of the cockpit, it's easier to access than the bathrooms.
BQ's own person favorite among the cast......Marriette Hartley as a woman who thought it was a good idea to fly while 8 months pregnant, and turns down a glass of milk, preferring to swig a Bloody Mary. To the surprise of nobody who's ever seen a disaster film, she goes into labor as Brolin's threatening to blow everybody to Kingdom Come......and in this slightly kinder, gentler era of birth depictions, her labor pains sound discreetly muted, similar to a case of mild indigestion.
For all the above reasons, I can't say I didn't enjoy revisiting "Skyjacked", a junky but diverting chunk of trivia unearthed from a 1970's time capsule. If you're looking for a guilty pleasure from that era, you could do a lot worse.......2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)
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