Passenger 57 Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.0

Passenger 57 Blu-ray Movie Review

Looks Like He Picked the Wrong Day to Hijack a Plane

Reviewed by Michael Reuben July 31, 2013

A prison sentence for tax evasion may have interrupted Wesley Snipes's career, but in the Nineties he was a major movie star whose trajectory appeared, at least for a time, to be on a parallel course with that of Will Smith. Still, Snipes never had the indefinable "likability" factor that burnished Smith's appeal. Snipes could trade quips with the best of them, but his characters were always coiled, intense and dangerous. Where Smith's breakthrough role was as the fast-talking, womanizing cop, Mike Lowry in Bad Boys, Snipes first caught the world's attention as the ruthless, charismatic drug lord, Nino Brown, in New Jack City. The following year, he demonstrated his range in the successful buddy comedy, White Man Can't Jump, with Woody Harrelson, and the action vehicle, Passenger 57.

Passenger 57 was originally intended for Sylvester Stallone, whose fingerprint remains on the film in the name of Tom Sizemore's character, Sly Delvecchio. Made on a modest budget (helped, in no small measure, because Snipes did not command anywhere near Stallone's asking price), the film turned a profit at the box office and established Snipes's credibility as an action hero. After a series of other action films—some successful (Demolition Man), some not (Money Train)—Snipes began the trilogy of Blade films in 1998 through his own production company. Blade became his signature role.

Passenger 57 was also an important film for its director, Kevin Hooks, who was making his second feature. One of Hollywood's most prolific African-American directors, Hooks learned his craft in Eighties TV (beginning with St. Elsewhere), then moved into feature films in the Nineties. In this century, he has directed an impressive list of TV projects including 24, NYPD Blue, Bones and Castle, among many others. Hooks has also produced several series, including the short-lived but memorable Last Resort.

The titular passenger in Passenger 57 is John Cutter (Snipes), number 57 on the manifest of an Atlantic International Airlines flight from Miami to Los Angeles. Cutter has just been persuaded to take a job as Atlantic's chief of security by an old friend, Sal Delvecchio (Sizemore), the airline's general manager, and he is en route to an interview with the board of directors and a presentation at the stockholders meeting. A former federal law enforcement officer, Cutter has been idling in private life for two years since he failed to prevent the death of his wife, Lisa (Elena Ayala, in flashbacks), at the hand of an armed robber.

Ironically for a man who has just taken a job with an airline, Cutter hates to fly. This particular flight will be especially unpleasant for two reasons. The first is that the head flight attendant, Marti Slayton (Alex Datcher), is someone whom Cutter publicly humiliated during a recent security training session for airline personnel—and Marti hasn't forgotten. The second is that the FBI is using this flight, without advance notice to Atlantic, to transport one of the world's most dangerous terrorists, Charles Rane (Bruce Payne), to stand trial in L.A.

Nicknamed "The Rane of Terror", the soft-spoken British psychopath has already put his escape plan into motion before takeoff. Once the flight is airborne, Rane's confederates concealed below deck and among the passengers and crew seize control of the plane, and Rane coldly executes a few hostages to demonstrate that he's master of the situation. Cutter narrowly manages to alert Delvecchio, before he too is cut off from assistance.

Thus begins an increasingly deadly and chaotic battle between the terrorist and the former lawman, who refuses to be bested by another maniac. The script by Stewart Raffill (The Philadelphia Experiment, original version), David Loughery (Dreamscape) and Dan Gordon (Wyatt Earp) does not provide the luxury of a long, tense build-up such as Stuart Baird would orchestrate four years later in the airplane hijack thriller Executive Decision. For Passenger 57, Hooks has Cutter battling Ranes and his minions at breakneck speed—in the air, on the ground (after Cutter forces the plane down at a small airfield in Louisiana), at a nearby county fair, on a merry-go-round and a ferris wheel, even during a hostage negotiation overseen by a top FBI man, Dwight Henderson (Robert Hooks, the director's father). All the while, Cutter's friend, Delvecchio, is trying to run interference for his security chief, while the airline's chairman, Ramsey (Bruce Greenwood), plots how to spin the disaster for maximum PR deflection.

One of Passenger 57's most memorable elements is Bruce Payne's incarnation of Rane, a killer in the Hans Gruber mold who's capable of chatting amiably with someone right up until the moment he puts a bullet in their head. Payne is so good, and he makes Rane so disturbing, that he eventually sets Passenger 57 off balance. The film's many light-hearted moments—Cutter's banter with a good ol' boy Louisiana police chief named Biggs (Ernie Lively) borders on the painful—don't sit comfortably next to grim scenes of hostages being executed and bodies being pushed out of airplane doors. It takes substantial finesse on a director's part, and also a longer running time than Passenger 57's 84 minutes, to modulate effectively between two such extreme tones so that the transitions aren't jarring. John McTiernan managed it in the first Die Hard, but he had almost an hour more to work with, during which he could make Hans the true villain, while his gang became cartoons on which John McClane kept dropping anvils. Hooks doesn't have enough time even to develop such secondary villains, although there are several interesting possibilities, including Twin Peaks veteran Michael Horse and one more I'll leave for first-time viewers to discover.

Passenger 57 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Passenger 57 was shot by veteran Canadian cinematographer Mark Irwin, whose credits include Scream and David Cronenberg's The Fly. The image on Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray has very good detail, black levels, color saturation and contrast, but it is overall somewhat softer and less sharp than many Blu-ray consumers expect from their action films, having been spoiled by digital photography and digital post-production. Irwin used anamorphic lenses, which have been known (depending on lighting, film stocks and exposure) to soften edges and provide a smoothness to the image that is sometimes confused with noise reduction. Here, the softness appears to be inherent in the original element and has not been induced by high frequency filtering or other digital manipulation.

With a short running time and no real extras, the 84-minute film fits easily onto a BD-25, with an acceptable average bitrate of 22.94. Mbps.

Passenger 57 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

According to IMDb, Passenger 57 was released to theaters in Dolby Stereo, which would have been the norm for a medium-budget film from 1992. When Warner issued the film on DVD in 1998, it remixed the stereo for Dolby Digital 5.1, and that mix is now presented on Blu-ray in lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1. While rear channel effects are not as pronounced and dramatic as they might be in a contemporary sound mix for a movie with major sequences set aboard an airplane, the stereo separation is often fantastic. So is the bass extension, which immediately announces its presence with Stanley Clarke's punchy theme over the opening titles. Clarke's instrumentation ricochets across the front soundstage in a cheerful foreshadowing of the fast-paced action to come, before receding into the background to support the rest of the film.

Dialogue is clear throughout, and the sounds of gunfire and an occasional explosion pack the requisite punch. So do the blows meted out by both Cutter and Rane, to various people and to each other.

Passenger 57 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The only extra is a trailer (480i; 1.78:1, enhanced; 1:59). Warner's 1998 DVD had nine trailers.

Passenger 57 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Post 9/11, I doubt that any film about an airplane hijacking can ever play the same as it was originally intended. The scene where Rane charges into the cockpit and immediately kills one of the crew so that the others know he means business was appalling enough when Passenger 57 first appeared; now it feels a little too real. That's not to say that the film can't still be enjoyed for the escapist entertainment it was meant to be, just that sometimes reality catches up with our popular culture—and you really have to stop and admire how effectively movies can serve as the proverbial "canary in the coal mine". Passenger 57 has its limitations as an action movie, and I would rank Executive Decision as a superior thriller, but it has its charms, and Warner's Blu-ray is a capable rendition. Recommended.