Airplane! (1980)

[6]

On a continental flight from Los Angeles to Chicago, everyone who ate the fish dinner becomes gravely ill, including the entire cockpit crew. It’s up to a traumatized war pilot (Robert Hays) and a bumbling ground team (including Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges) to bring the imperiled flight to a safe landing. That’s the scenario behind this goofy comedy from writer/directors Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker (The Kentucky Fried Movie, Top Secret!).

This Airplane! flies on a razor-thin plot, with sight gags, stunts, parody, double-entendres, and other types of absurdity hitting it like never-ending turbulence. It’s perhaps the hardest kind of comedy to pull off successfully, relying almost entirely on its jokes, with little-to-no assistance from things like character development, message, or meaning. Many of the jokes work for me. My favorites include an inflatable auto-pilot who seems to have a mind of its own, and a ‘fourth-wall’ gag involving a little boy who visits the cockpit and identifies one of the copilots as a famous basketball player. The copilot, played by NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, tries very hard to convince the boy he’s a pilot, not a ball player. That is, until the boy mentions how much his dad criticizes Jabbar’s athletic performance. Co-stars Leslie Nielsen and Peter Graves, along with Stack, are all put to terrific use delivering silly dialogue with dead-pan seriousness, and Barbara Billingsley (from Leave It to Beaver) makes a great cameo as a ‘jive’ interpreter.

Airplane! is still fairly entertaining in 2022, but it’s surprising how many of the jokes rely on religion, race, and sexual orientation. I don’t hold this against the film, nor am I a fan of ‘cancel culture’. It’s just a product of its time in this way. I find the creative team’s follow-up, 1984’s Top Secret! to be vastly superior in many ways — epic in comparison, with more charismatic leads, more ambitious comic set-pieces, and better jokes overall. But without Airplane!, there probably would never have been Top Secret!, and for that, I tip my hat.

With Julie Hagerty and Lorna Patterson.