On the First Day of Die Hard, My True Love Gave To Me...

We’ve been covering the “Five Days of Die Hard” on this site for a few years now, and at this point I think we’ve really settled into what is required for a proper Die HardThe 1980s were famous for the bombastic action films released during the decade. Featuring big burly men fighting other big burly men, often with more guns, bombs, and explosions than appear in Michael Bay's wildest dreams, the action films of the decade were heavy on spectacle, short on realism. And then came a little film called Die Hard that flipped the entire action genre on its head.. Admittedly I am looser on my definition than some as I consider the various Home Alone films to be in the genre (certainly kissing cousins with, at least), while others (including Macaulay Culkin) do not, but still the basics of the formula are pretty set.

You need to have a lone hero who gets mixed up in trouble, usually from terrorists. That hero is generally considered something of a loose cannon among his peers. The terrorists have to want something, usually money (because it’s almost always about money). The hero will find every way they can to deny the bad guys what they want, often picking them off one by one in the process. And then, in the end, the hero walks away, free and happy, because the bad guys have been dealt with (likely permanently).

It’s not a deep formula, which is why, from 1988 on for easily the next decade, there were a ton of Die Hard style films released. Every major action star had to have their own, and the locations the story took place at were varied. Die Hard, but at a hockey rink. Die Hard, but on a Navy ship. Die Hard, but on a bus. Die Hard, but this time Dennis Rodman is also hanging around. And then there’s Passenger 57, which is Die Hard, but on a plane. Honestly, that’s such a good setup that we’ve seen multiple iterations of Die Hard on a plane over the years. Even from Die Hard, to a certain extent.

Passenger 57 is noteworthy not because of its plane setting, though, but because of its lead star: Wesley Snipes. This wasn’t Snipes’s first lead role. He’d been in a number of films, some of them quite successful, including White Men Can’t Jump (which, like Passenger 57, was also released in 1992). This film, though, was the first time Snipes was able to act as a lead action hero. Snipes had been training in martial arts since he was 12, holding a number of black belts in multiple disciplines, and Passenger 57 let him do his own stunts and show off what he was capable of. And there’s no doubt that because of the success of this film, Snipes was able to parlay himself into a series of great action performances, including his career defining role as BladeWhen his mother was bitten by a vampire while Blade was still in the womb, it passed their powers onto him without all their weaknesses. Now he stalks the night, fighting the very creatures that made him..

Admittedly I haven’t watched the film since it came out on basic cable soon after its release. It was one of those films that was very successful at the time (making $66.5 Mil against a $15 Mil budget) but then faded out of everyone’s memories soon after. Which is fair; the 1990s were full of Die Hard clones, and while this one was notable for having Snipes in the lead, it wasn’t that notable. Going back and watching it again, you can see why it made money, but also why it fell off soon after. It’s a credible, if not fantastic, turn for the genre, but it certainly was beaten by other, better Die Hard clones over time.

The film has Snipes playing John Cutter, a security specialist (and former Secret Service agent) working for Atlantic Airlines. Cutter is very good at his job, even if he’s sometimes gruff with the people he’s training, such as flight attendant Marti Slayton (Alex Datcher), who he gets snippy with during a staged training exercise. Still, he’s good enough at his job that the airline wants to promote him to a Vice President position. He just needs to fly out to Los Angeles, do a couple of meetings, and the job is his.

However, things go off the rails pretty quickly on his flight. Before the plane could take off, two FBI agents come onboard escorting Charles Rane (Bruce Payne), a terrorist about to spend a very short life in California before getting executed for his crimes. But Rane has other plans, and he’s already gotten his own people onto the plane in key positions, ready to spring him once the flight is in the air. They just didn’t count on John Cutter being there, and with Cutter stuck in the middle of the fray, an already interesting flight is going to get a whole lot more violent…

The best parts of Passenger 57 are the action. Snipes, unlike many of his contemporaries, is actually quite good at action, and most of his scenes don’t feel staged. He’s strong and fluid and he makes the action feel pretty solid. It’s not perfect, but then most 1990s action never was. But if you compare this to scenes from, say, a Steven Seagal movie (like Under Siege), the action here is miles better. Snipes proves himself as a credible action leading man, and that’s really all this film needed to do to be watchable.

With that said, everything outside of Snipes is pretty weak. Payne is pretty bad as the terrorist Rane. He’s too wormy, too slimy, without the right kind of menace to sell himself as a world class mind working three steps ahead of everyone else (which is what he’d have to be to pull off his escape plan). He throws the vibe of the villains’ side of the story way off, and the film isn’t really able to recover. You’re fine with Snipes beating the shit out of him, but it never feels like a fair fight, or a battle of equals, not like you get from a proper McClain/Gruber pairing. This pairing never matches up.

Really, the whole film feels like it’s straining to meet the formula. It has the terrorists, and the lone wolf fighting them, and the single, central location where all the action can take place, but the movie keeps getting bored with its whole setup. It lets Cutter leave the plane, then forces him back on, all for a bit of a breather in between. It has the villain try to escape the plane, only to get back on as if that was always his plan. It waffles back and forth, never quite sure where it’s going or what it’s doing. It struggles to keep its own attention, let alone ours.

But the biggest issue is simply that it never really makes us care. Rane isn’t a very interesting, charismatic villain, so we never think about whether we might want him to escape or not. We also don’t know what his plan is beyond escape, as there’s never a mention of money, or where he’s going, or what he plans to do next. He’s a villain working in a vacuum, and it’s hard to feel anything about that. He kills people, we feel bad about that, and that’s really as far as the film goes. We can only engage with Cutter because nothing else around him is interesting, villain included.

Which is why it’s a good thing that Snipes is as good in the role as he is. With a lesser action star, Passenger 57 would be unwatchable. It’s just good enough that we can get engaged with Snipes and have fun with what he’s doing, but it really does feel like a lesser effort for everyone else involved. It’s great that this was the launch pad for Snipes to go on and do bigger, better action films. He clearly deserved it. But Passenger 57 isn’t worth remembering for anything more than, “this is where Snipes, the action star, got his start.” And then, like everyone else, you can move on from this lesser effort of the genre.