Drop Zone

Drop Zone casts Wesley Snipes as Pete Nessip, a brash U.S. marshal who goes undercover with cocky skydivers to catch a vicious criminal (Gary Busey’s Ty Moncrief). It’s a far-from-innovative premise that’s employed to familiar yet consistently watchable effect by filmmaker John Badham, as the director, working from a screenplay by Peter Barsocchini and John Bishop, delivers a briskly-paced thriller that benefits from strong performances and a handful of compelling sequences – with, in terms of the latter, the Die Hard-like third act certainly packing a far more engrossing and entertaining punch than one might’ve anticipated. And although the picture’s been packed with several eye-popping skydiving sequences, Drop Zone admittedly does suffer from a somewhat stagnant midsection that focuses just a little too keenly on the aerial exploits of the various characters (eg there are perhaps one too many training sequences here). It’s nevertheless impossible to deny the movie’s effectiveness as an almost prototypical ’90s thriller, as Badham’s infused Drop Zone with the myriad of attributes one expects from the lamentably underrated genre (including exciting action beats and a proliferation of quirky, memorable periphery characters).

*** out of ****