Airplane!

Directed by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, Airplane! details the chaos that unfolds aboard a commercial airliner after its pilots fall ill from food poisoning. It’s a straight-forward premise that’s employed as a springboard for an erratic yet frequently hilarious satire of disaster movies, as the filmmakers, armed with their own screenplay, deliver a briskly-paced endeavor that benefits from its raft of laugh-out-loud funny gags and uniformly compelling performances – with, in terms of the latter, Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker eliciting engrossing, iconic work from folks like Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Leslie Nielsen, and Robert Stack. (It’s Lloyd Bridges’ scene-stealing, go-for-broke turn as a control-tower professional that remains an ongoing highlight within the proceedings, however.) And although the picture admittedly does contain a handful of lulls, with this particularly true of a first half that contains one or two too many flashbacks, Airplane!, anchored by its proliferation of uproarious jokes and set-pieces, ultimately confirms its place as a justifiably legendary spoof film that’s just as potent (and memorable) today as it must’ve been in 1980.

*** out of ****