‘You wouldn’t take advantage of a helpless man…’
Some actors can make any old shit watchable. Luckily for everyone involved in Passenger 57, Wesley Snipes is one of those actors. This film is laughably implausible, the dialogue is wince-inducing, the villain preposterous… and yet it’s all ok because Snipes is just so damn compelling…
Cliches abound. Snipes plays John Cutter, a veteran law enforcement official turned airline security expert haunted by the death of his wife who is coaxed out of retirement for one last job. Charles Rane is a terrorist and psychopath. Think an uneasy mixture of Hans Gruber and Hannibal Lecter. The two meet when Rane hijacks the plane that Cutter is boarding to attend his new job. I think I can sum up the rest of the plot by evoking this ridiculously convoluted tagline: He’s an ex-cop with a bad mouth, a bad attitude, and a bad seat. For the terrorists on flight 163 . . . he’s very bad news. Quite.
I mentioned Hans Gruber earlier and so it’s not unsurprising that Passenger 57 feels like a rip-off of Die Hard (or more accurately Die Hard 2). What sets Passenger 57 aside is Snipes’ all-action performance and the eccentricity of Bruce Payne’s portrayal of Charles Rane. The two performances feel like they should be taking place in two totally different movies and so seeing them together is uncanny but strangely pleasing.
Passenger 57 was met with a shrug by critics upon release and it has been mostly forgotten since. It was, however, a huge box office success and paved the way for Snipes to position himself as a bona fide action movie superstar. Ironically, at 84 minutes it’s the kind of film that is perfect for a flight. Undemanding. A little preposterous. Impossible to resist.