“Airplane” (1980) – Movie Review

Written and directed by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker

Also written by Arthur Hailey, Hall Bartlett, and John C. Champion

Starring Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, and Lloyd Bridges

‘A Crashing Disappointment’

The main purpose of comedies is to make audiences laugh by providing a good sense of humor. Without the humor, however, a comedy is not entitled to its genre at all. It does not even deserve to be called a comedy if there is no humor.

Yet nobody can really say that something is worse than bad humor. Humor that is not comical is basically nothing. It does not serve its purpose at all.

A nonsensical, silly, and tremendously unfunny movie is “Airplane!”. Released in 1980, the movie opened to a great amount of critical acclaim, mainly due to its humor. Many people were calling it one of the best comedies ever made, but I just do not get why. To me, this movie is utter rubbish with no real sense of humor at all. The film tries to get humor across in several ways such as being dumb and strange, but in a movie industry where sharp and clever comedies are being made, this stands as one of the worst ever put to screen.

The direction is noticeably bad, but it is not the most awful factor, when taking into consideration other failures of this film. It almost seems as though amateur directors were hired to make this movie, because nothing about it works. There is no sense of proper direction or events. The two main characters are slightly developed, but the rest of the cast is astoundingly disposed off, with cliched and formulaic roles that hardly work.

What’s even worse and probably the most destructive asset of this movie, is its script. The characters are not interesting or engaging at all and that clearly displays the weakness of the screenplay. In addition, the jokes are far from comical or funny. They are rather complicated and references to specific people/events. For a person with no knowledge of these references, it seems unlikely that the jokes would be humorous, and they really are not. If they are not funny, what is the point of the movie? The screenwriters throw away every opportunity to make the movie comical, preferably relying on far-fetched, stupid situations to get laughs out of a viewer.

There is a cast but no way to talk about it. There is unfortunately no one in the cast that saves this movie. Each actor and actress gets their job done, but it just seems like a money-making scheme. It seems as though the cast only appeared in this movie for the money, not for the characters.

As a whole, “Airplane!” does not soar at all. Yes, I do know that it is a parody and spoof of disaster movies, but its not funny at all. There is only one or two moments where it appears to be funny, but otherwise it is dull and actually uninteresting. Nothing works and the film is not even worth watching for free. You will feel your time completely wasted.

If humor was like this in the 1980’s, then let’s relish the fact that it has improved monumentally since then.

1.5/5 stars