Video clip - featuring Hugh Laurie. Clip has been edited [9.2 MB]

Sunday Mercury (Birmingham, England); 12/21/2003

JOAN E. VADEBONCOEUR
ENTERTAINMENT COLUMNIST

December 21, 2004, THE POST-STANDARD

When "The Flight of the Phoenix" ar- rived on movie screens in 1966, it was consid- ered a ground-breaking. Not only was it a suspense tale, it delivered some characters who could be deemed enigmatic.

Alas, it has been remade and turned into a date movie. Each of the stranded passengers who survived a desert crash was created carefully to appeal to a broad audiences.

Besides the skilled but determinedly risk-taking pilot (Dennis Quaid). there is a strong woman (Miranda Otto), who resents her crew being plucked from their remote oil-drilling operation, and there is a young man (Giovanni Ribisi) who prefers to be a loner until his skills as an airplane designer are required.

Finally, there is the ultimate cliche, the corporate executive (Hugh Laurie) who believes himself above the other survivors and cares only for himself.

The others are simply stereotypes seen in dozens of action-adventure flicks. Also annoying is the fact that the band appears to have sufficient water and food for many days. There goes much of the peril. If there were not a sandstorm or two, danger seems as remote as the oil camp. No wonder there is little squabbling and much bonding.

Despite its obvious intentions, the film manages to stay afloat until the Nomads arrive to threaten the group. Once a shooting occurs, viewers wonder why the natives don't just wipe out the hapless strangers. One character wonders aloud the same thing.

Give director John Moore credit for one thing. Until the very last moment he resists creating a romance between Quaid and Otto. Handshake suffices until fadeout.

Luckily, he possesses a strong cast, the least of which is Quaid, who scowls and carps his way for nearly two hours. Otto is left with nothing to play in her token female role. However, Tyrese Gibson as the co-pilot projects the charisma Quaid ought to have shown.

The plum part goes to Ribisi — slight, bespectacled and bleached blonde. At times, he exudes a slightly prissy air. but, chiefly, the actor delivers a performance of rigidity. arrogance and a faint air of Nazi Aryanism.

FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX (12A) Before he launched his version of Flight Of The Phoenix, Irish director John Moore decided not to watch the original movie starring James Stewart which earned Scots actor Ian Bannan an Oscar nomination, 'It wasn't hard to avoid, it meant just didn't put on the DVD somebody sent me,' says Moore, who also made Behind Enemy Lines with Gene Hackman and Owen Wilson.

Moore reckoned that no matter how his film - about a plane that crashes in the desert and then the survivors attempt to rebuild the aircraft - turned out it would still face flak.

'There will be a small amount of people who will HATE the fact that we have remade the movie but never thought we were assailing some cinematic masterpiece that didn't deserve retelling,' says the director.

'In fact, the original is such a good story that it did deserve retelling. What we did was take a great story and do things that they couldn't do, which was to give it scope and give the audience a visual spectacle on the bigger scale.'

The re-make stars Dennis Quaid, Hugh Laurie and Scots actor Tony Curran and Moore admits that he put them through the mill when he filmed the plane crash.

He took the centre fuselage of the plane, built a huge wheel around it and wrapped a cable round that and tied it to a truck.

'The truck would drive, spin the wheel and the entire aeroplane set would go through 360 degrees,' says Moore.

'So then you get the zero gravity effect, when your tie will go up in the air. The actors were terrified. There was no point in rehearsing the scene - quite frankly in case one of them said they weren't doing it again.

'It was perfectly safe but they were only going to react as scared as that once. For that scene I used six cameras!'

The film is set in Mongolia's Gobi Desert but filming took place in Namibia and Moore had a flight experience out there that was frighteningly close to the plot.

He says: 'We had a helicopter fuel pump go. We were at 4500ft.The engine stopped getting fuel and a warning light came on. After the initial panic, you realise the physics take over so we just touched down. The bigger problem was we were in the middle of nowhere.

'I wondered if we were going to start living the film. We had to sit around for four and a half hours till someone realised we hadn't checked in, then a guy worked out where we were and a Land Rover turned up

Never work with children and animals they say. Well Irish director John Moore might add something else to the list. Sand. For his follow up to debut feature Behind Enemy Lines, the 34 year old former commercials whiz and self-confessed planes nut signedon to remake Flight of the Phoenix, the 1965 survival drama in which, their aircraft having crashed in the Gobi desert, the survivors set out to build another from the wreckage.

Determined to make it all look at realistic as possible without retouching the photography to remove roads, Moore scoured the world looking for the right location.

Having spent seven fruitless days sitting in a Beijing hotel waiting for papers to visit Mongolia and having ruled out Morocco because they were shooting at each other over the Algerian border, he stopped off in Namibia on the way home andrealised it wasperfect. But seven and a half months worth of sand can make 'perfect' a bit of a mixed blessing.

'The silicate in the sand conducts electricity,' he explains. 'And sand gets everywhere. So it would get into a camera and shut it down.' And of course, there was just a small problem with the dunes.

'They keep moving,' he recalls resignedly. 'Over a period of four months, one of the major dunes that was featured in 30 per cent of the shots reduced in height by 120 feet. So the production designer spent most of his day with a bulldozer trying to putback what nature had decided that we didn't need any more overnight. It's more like an ocean than a desert. We had 222 dune groomers who would form themselves into squad sections and run with their rakes. But then you'd get one stray footprint and you'dbe f***d. If a cup was to blow away we'd be shouting at some over eager PA not to chase after it!'

And it's not just grooming sand for continuity purposes. Everything had to be left exactly as it was found.

'The Namibian location guy was a bit of a concerned environmentalist and very sensitive to his responsibilities. He'd play ball but he wouldn't let you f*** with his desert. If you needed to get somewhere you had to build a road and then put it backafterwards because you have torecover the area. In fact we had a small local crew who spent a whole year recovering everything we touched!'

On top of which the Namibian desert isn't exactly a tourist trap. For a start, the mornings are freezing cold, an irony not exactly lost on star Dennis Quaid who had been sweltering on the set of big freeze movie The Day After Tomorrow. And you cancertainly forget luxury hotels? It's hardly a set up designed to put big happy smiles on the faces of movie stars used to more pampered conditions.

'If you look at a map there's a small town on the western seaboard called Swakopmund and that's where we were based,' says Moore.

'It's actually a German touristtown. They have a lot of holiday homes, they go there two weeks a year and let the desert take over for the rest of it. So there were no Starbucks, sushi bars or Four Seasons. That suited me fine, because people concentrateout in the wild. But at the start some of the cast were a little more moany than others.

'We had one who wanted to leave the moment he got there, He just freaked out realising he was going to be there for four months and had to be 'talked off the ledge' about two days before we started shooting. But even if you freak out you can't hop on aplane anywhere. You're three flights away from most places that high maintenance actors would want to be.'

Ah yes, high maintenance actorsThat would be another 'must to avoid' on Moore's list.

Can you avoid high maintenance actors?

'The thing is people are liars,' he says in his refreshingly blunt way.

'It's that old thing that they can horse ride and fence and speak six languages. When you're casting people they couldn't be nicer and can't do enough for you, but the minute they get that job the person you just hired is gone forever and rarely will yousee them again. I've had that experience a couple of times, where the guy who walks out of that room is not the guy who turned up on set three weeks later.'

Given this is only Moore's second film having worked with Gene Hackman and Owen Wilson, it does rather narrow down the suspects, especially since he insists that, mystery unhappy location bunny aside, everyone on Phoenix was a pure delight. Even Quaid.

'He's a real morale booster. He was really fun to work with. He had a sort of grouchy reputation, I think he just winds people up for fun, shouts at them, but half the time he's just laughing to himself. He had his guitar with him, so he'd sit on thestep of his trailer and jam away. And Hugh Laurie is a great jazz guitarist as well, so there were occasional spontaneous jam sessions.'

But Moore's most fulsome praiseis reserve for Giovanni Ribisi who takes the old Hardy Kruger role (complete with dyed blond hair) as the enigmatic stranger who suggests they cannibalise the parts to build another plane.

'Let's get one thing straight,' declares Moore. 'In my humble opinion Ribisi is one of the greatest actors in the world and he's going to become part of the folklore of 21st Century American acting a la Marlon Brando. A good 60 or 70 per cent ofHollywood actors aren't really acting, but with Ribisi it's genuine.

'He's way ahead of the game in terms of being the character. But he was also smart enough to have a great sense of humour about it. So he'd stay in character to weird people out but not to be a pain in the arse. He was somewhere between weirdo anddemi-God.

'And he's a real method actor. That term has been hijacked by actors who are all 'look at me, look at me', being difficult and making out everything is so hard. But he's the real version. He does the work quietly in the corner, and then brings it to theset and isn't difficult and precious. The idea that an actor is so disruptive on a set because it's all about their process, really isn't that much fun. If you want to enjoy the process of making the movie you're better off hiring people like Ribisi!'


©2005 Independent Newspapers (UK) Limited.

Resolutely, gloriously old-school in every regard, "The Flight of the Phoenix" is a reminder that disaster films don't need the threat of global annihilation to be good entertainment.

The catastrophe here is a simple plane crash, stranding the pilots and their passengers in the Gobi Desert. The challenge is getting most of them out alive. The simplicity of the situation, the tight cast of characters and the steadily growing peril as resources dwindle and tempers flare make for a solid, tense survival story.

Dennis Quaid might never quite outgrow his status as the poor man's Harrison Ford, but with the notoriously picky Ford working so rarely, it's good to have Quaid in reserve. He brings a gritty Marlboro Man intensity to the role of Capt. Frank Towns, the cynical oil company pilot charged with transporting a field crew out of their shuttered drilling operation in Mongolia.

Towns' reputation as a bearer of pink slips precedes him, and when his C-119 cargo plane lands, the workers realize what the firm hadn't told them: They're terminated. When they troop onto his plane, they're already angry and divided. Officious executive Ian (Hugh Laurie) doesn't much like the laborers, and chief geologist Kelly (Miranda Otto) resents him in turn for closing her project.

There's animosity enough for a bumpy flight already, even before Towns flies the plane through a violent sandstorm. Cerebral, mysterious Elliott (Giovanni Ribisi), who hitched a ride back to civilization, informs Towns that the plane is overloaded and can't reach a safe flying altitude. The infallibly logical Elliott is right - he's always right - which does nothing to endear him to Towns, who doesn't like being second-guessed.

After a thrillingly staged crash, the survivors find themselves stranded without a radio in a trackless wasteland. The sun pounds them like a sledgehammer as they parcel out the rations and water that might sustain them for 30 days, provided that they don't exert themselves.

Towns advises that they all sit tight and wait for a search-and-rescue squad to find them. What are the odds of that happening? Kelly asks. Five percent, Towns replies, but since the odds of having crashed in the first place are less than 5 percent, he considers himself an optimist.

The oil workers aren't persuaded, and in order to quell a potential mutiny, Towns must rely on Elliott's engineering know-how to salvage usable equipment from the damaged plane and fashion a jerry-rigged aircraft that might, possibly, maybe, fly them to safety.

Fans of the original 1965 "Flight of the Phoenix" starring James Stewart will find it reproduced here virtually beat for beat. But that's not a bad thing. The man-against-man and man-against-the-elements story remains completely compelling. It's engrossing to see unsympathetic characters reach into themselves to find something heroic to contribute to the seemingly impossible task and to weigh the occasionally ruthless decisions that have to be made for the greater good.

Ribisi's Elliott, smug about the indispensability his aerodynamic knowledge gives him, becomes the story's nominal villain. But he also reveals unexpected reserves of courage and humanity.

Director John Moore proved himself a master of high-flying action-adventure with 2001's "Behind Enemy Lines," and his follow-up offers a wealth of visceral thrills, tense crises and stirring escapes from danger. There's nothing profound or thought-provoking about "The Flight of the Phoenix," but it's a thoroughly satisfying flight of fantasy.

Colin Covert is at ccovert@startribune.com.

Flight of the phoenix (12a, 112mins) Drama. Dennis Quaid, Tyrese Gibson, Giovanni Ribisi, Miranda Otto, Tony Curran, Jacob Vargas, Hugh Laurie.

John Moore's remake of Flight Of The Phoenix, the 1965 adventure starring James Stewart, Richard Attenborough and Peter Finch, is a trifle infuriating.

At times, Scott Frank and Edward Burns's screenplay truly soars, striking a delicate balance between good old-fashioned human drama, wry humour and thrilling action.

But every time the picture seems to be gliding comfortably, the turbulence of a clumsy narrative twist or soppy sentimentality sends it hurtling back towards mediocrity.

Cargo plane pilot Frank Towns (Quaid) and his co-pilot AJ (Gibson) are sent to the Tan sag Basin in Mongolia to evacuate the disgruntled staff of an oil exploration operation which has recently been decommissioned.

The rig's chief roustabout Kelly (Otto) is furious at company hatchet man Ian (Laurie) for shutting down her team, but she reluctantly rounds them up for their departure.

The plane takes off, only to fly straight into a massive sand storm that batters the craft, forcing Frank to crash-land in the middle of the Gobi.

The surviving 11 passengers and crew realise the horror of the situation: with little food and water, they will surely die before anyone finds them in the shifting sands.

Then one of their number, who claims to be an airplane designer, offers a glimmer of hope: they can build a new aircraft from the undamaged component of the C-119.

Working together, the survivors ( including Hispanic cook Sammi (Vargas) and tough guy Rodney (Curran) ( put their differences to one side to achieve the impossible.

Flight Of The Phoenix opens with a spectacular plane crash sequence, melding computer graphics and stunt work.

In the desert, there's quite of lot of treading sand before the construction of the new plane but the 112 minutes pass quickly enough.

Quaid essays a nicely grizzled leader and Ribisi is both creepy and amusing as an oddball character whose hare-brained scheme may be the only chance of survival.

A couple of set-pieces ( a skirmish with desert smugglers and a lightning storm ( are a welcome diversion and help to cut the cast down to a manageable size for the finale.

Swearing; no sex; violence.