Air Force One (film)/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Complete Monster: Ivan Korshunov, who executes the Press Secretary even after the vice president shows she's willing to be reasonable, just because Radek's release would "take a little more time". And then he somehow tops this Moral Event Horizon by shooting a terrified innocent hostage in an attempt to get Marshall to surrender- all while she's begging for her life. And he has the President's baseball glove.
    • General Radek is also one. We actually don't see any of the atrocities he committed, but the way everyone talks about him suggest what kind of bloodthirsthy criminal must have been.
  • Crowning Moment of Awesome
    • Upon dispatching Ivan:

Marshall: Get off my plane!

      • The DVD chapter that he does it in is appropriately titled "Get off my plane."
      • In any Riff Trax that is covering a scene with a plane, expect Mike and the bots to yell this.
    • When the President has been rescued:

"Liberty 2-4 is changing call signs...Liberty 2-4 is now Air Force One!"

    • The dogfight, starting from the time the US jets hit the afterburners, but particularly the Heroic Sacrifice.
  • Ending Fatigue: And then some.
  • Memetic Mutation: "Get off my plane" was an early popular YTMND.
  • Motive Decay: Meta-example. Gary Oldman has said that Ivan Korushonov was originally written as much more three-dimensional and sympathetic when he signed up for the movie; Executive Meddling degraded him into a more typical action villain.
  • Special Effects Failure: The computer animation used for depicting Air Force One hitting the water was dated at the time and has not aged well over the years.
  • Tear Jerker: Most notably when the President is given a Sadistic Choice between the life of an innocent woman and his chance of saving everyone else. Ivan turns on the intercom so everyone on the plane can hear her plead for her life, right up until he shoots her, and we see the other hostages either close to breaking down or openly sobbing. If Ivan has only one true Complete Monster moment, this is it.
  • What an Idiot!: Terrorist Sergei apparently doesn't know what explosive decompression is. To get through a locked door he jams a fire extinguisher in the handle and shoots it. On a plane. This results in at least five people (including a restrained terrorist) getting sucked out of the plane (although we see three people have chutes safely opened). And the President almost fell out. Unfortunately, Sergei isn't one of them.
    • This also leads to the explosion of the tanker plane that was refueling Air Force One at the time, and could easily have killed EVERYONE if not for the pilot's quick thinking.
    • President Marshall also bluffs a terrorist to draw him down by speaking Russian (actually Polish) and the terrorist is held at gun point and the hostages are freed.
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