Airport '77 (1977)
Directed by Jerry Jameson
Flight 23 has crashed in the Bermuda Triangle after a hijacking gone wrong. Now the surviving passengers must brave panic, slow leaks, oxygen depletion, and more while attempting a daring plan, all while 200 feet underwater.
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What critics compared Airport '77 to
Black's homages are also a nice touch: Gosling amusingly channels Lou Costello in panic-stricken mode at one point, and there's a glimpse of a billboard promoting Airport '77 and an early teaser ad for 1978's Jaws 2 (I'm guessing Universal Pictures paid Warner Bros. a hefty sum for those plugs, since Warner is behind The Nice Guys while Universal has both the Airport and Jaws franchises arriving on Blu-ray next month).
From the opening establishing shot, which creeps out from behind the decaying and disrepaired Hollywood sign to the tiny background details (the 1977 setting is reconfirmed by billboards for the blockbusters of the day, like Smokey and the Bandit and Airport ’77) to the in-jokes (the porn producer’s latest is an adult version of Pinocchio, using the “It’s not my nose that grows” tagline of an actual porn film from earlier in the decade) to the tributes (a drunken Gosling discovers a dead body, and his wheezing, yelping take is full-on Lou Costello).
The real setting is a slightly anachronistic Los Angeles limbo where billboards for Airport ’77 and Jaws 2 tower over an intersection and worries about pollution, gas shortages, and killer bees are in the air.
The overall feel of the movie is like a ’70s disaster flick, like Airport or, better yet, Airport ’77, the cinematic piece of awesomeness that saw a 747 sink in the ocean, with the plane staying intact and the survivors searching for options to reach the surface, eventually opting for really big balloons.
But what starts as a moderately engaging, if familiar, exercise (like Airport '77) quickly deteriorates into farce (like The Concorde...Airport '79).
They were far from being great, but they had actors you could care about, from the truly all-star cast stuck in a burning 138-story skyscraper in the heart of San Francisco (and who is going to build a a 138-story skyscraper in the heart of San Francisco, seriously?) and the mostly all-star casts of "Earthquake" and "Airport '77" to the partial-stars, has-beens and never-weres of "Hindenburg" and "The Concorde: Airport '79."