Airplane! (1980)
Airplane! Review
Airplane! is a 1980 comedy film directed by David and Jerry Zuker and starring Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty and Leslie Nielsen. It is regarded as one of the best comedies of all time, but I myself found it to be stupid.
This is basically a parody of the disaster movies from the seventies. When the plot is concerned, it is just a parody and nothing else. It never has anything at least a bit original or unique about it. The saving grace here is the acting which is fine and the pacing which is also good. The film is well made and technically solid and those are the only strengths it has along with just a couple of mildly funny moments, mostly in the first half.
The humor is bad, just bad. I honestly cannot understand how anyone above the age of ten can find this film funny. The humor is so immature and so juvenile that it surprised me with its endless stupidity. The jokes here are literally word puns for the most part and that is the kind of humor that children like and I as an adult find really stupid and ridiculous. The whole film is so childish and so dumb that I was baffled at its iconic status. I think that Airplane! is a classic because it is over three decades old, but if it came out today, it would have been badly received and rightfully so. But that just points to the hypocrisy of critics and that annoys me so much.
The characters are also incredibly flat, shallow and stupid. Not one of them stands out and their jokes are just so repetitive and dumb. Also, the protagonist’s war-related drama is so boring as is the whole movie. It lasts for just an hour and a half and I was still bored to death. The romance is also so cheesy and tedious.
Another thing that bothered me here has to be its offensive nature. Airplane! is filled with sexism, racism and homophobia. There are literally some scenes that appalled me how offensive and hateful they were. That is a problem when the jokes aren’t funny and the movie instead becomes a giant hate project. The women here are awful how they’re portrayed. A gay character is flamboyant and likes fashion, of course. And black people are difficult to understand because they talk differently. Wow, I was absolutely appalled at all of this. Because of that offensive nature and because of the parodying of a genre that was present just in the seventies, the movie becomes incredibly dated and irrelevant as well. It might have been interesting for that time period, but now it isn’t. And its awful humor remains awful. Needless to say, this is one of the most overrated “classic” films, the one that did not deserve its reputation at all and I am seriously angry and sad to be a film fan when this kind of film gets that kind of reputation. It gives a bad name to the whole industry and I don’t know what is wrong with all the critics in particular for giving it a pass.
Airplane! is one of the worst and, needless to say, overrated “classic and iconic” movies. Its characters are stupid, the plot is irrelevant and dated and the film is incredibly offensive by simultaneously being sexist, racist and homophobic. But its humor is so immature, juvenile and just plain dumb that I honestly cannot understand how anyone above the age of ten can enjoy it.
