The passengers are emplaning on Flight 69 of Global Circumcisional Airlines for Minneapolis. They are the usual diverse lot. We know one of them must be a hijacker because the title of the movie is "Skyjacked." It's always fun to try to pick the villain out of a crowd. We can immediately dispose of the black, generous, cello player, Rosie Greer. We can forget about the sergeant in the US Army, James Brolin -- unless he's a phony. The pregnant wife is out, unless she's got a device stashed in that swollen abdomen. I missed the little child who desperately needs a kidney transplant or a transfusion of rare blood, but since there is no such child, he or she is out too. Another passenger is depressed but not suicidally. It's certainly not the incandescent young Susan Dey. Nobody with that overbite could plant a bomb. The Senator is played by the avuncular Walter Pidgeon, so he's out. I suppose we can discount the priest. It would be a novelty if the villain were one of the crew, but since it would be a novelty and this is only an assemblage of clichés, the crew is out. Now, this is 1972 so we must look for someone with a foreign accent, especially anything that sounds remotely SLAVIC. But we haven't met anyone like that yet. On the other hand, among the list of cast members, we may note the name "Claude Atkins." There's a serviceable villain for you, but he's down on the ground at Anchorage.Like water, the narrative follows the quickest route downhill. The co-pilot, Mike Henry, snuggles up to the Stewardess Superior, Yvette Mimieux who is grim with worry after the warning appears: Change course for Anchorage -- or else! "Don't be afraid, Honey," he murmurs, "after all we haven't 'had fun' in Anchorage yet, have we?" Flashback: Mimieux being pushed on a swing, all sunshine and summer and flashing legs, smiling down at Henry the Pusher and calling out, "Do you know how much I love you?" Other brief flashbacks will show the now drunk and embittered Sergeant Brolin being decorated after Vietnam. Flashback to Heston and his stricken wife at lakeside: "I'm sorry. It's all over with Angela. You know that." She falls into his arms; they kiss, tears rolling down her cheeks. End of flashback.Captain Charlton Heston, nobody's fool, turns the aircraft north towards Anchorage, despite warnings of heavy weather. Now and again there are some attractive shots of a gleaming Boeing 707 slicing through the clouds. Nice sleek airplanes except that sometimes their swept-back wings wobbled alarmingly. Once the nut job outs himself, he forces Heston to fly to Moscow, where the unexpected happens -- unexpected in the sense that there is little logic behind it.It was directed by John Guillerman whose cinematic biography is checkered. He did some nice work, but then he kept pumping out turkeys like "King Kong Lives," in which I co-starred. My performance was the only memorable one. Here, he treats the big wide movie screen as if it were a small-scale television set -- zapping the camera back and forth from one terrified face to another, filling the screen with gigantic close ups of popping eyeballs and cheeks beaded with sweat. Close ups are -- or were -- traditionally used for incidents of moment but Guillerman uses them with inexcusable profligacy. In "Henry V," Lawrence Olivier pulled the camera BACK away from the speaker during important scenes. Somewhere over the Bering Sea, Mariette Hartley -- granddaughter of behaviorist John B. Watson -- chooses to give birth. Multiple close ups of her brave face sweating profusely.Heston handles the role the best he can and, as usual, he's quite good. Rock solid, one might say. The rest of the cast are all hobbled by their stereotyped roles and about half of them can't really act. The crazed hijacker is sometimes laughable.

Had this been made by Universal Studios instead of MGM, they might well have called it AIRPORT '72, so closely does it follow the template of that popular disaster movie series; it even casts Charlton Heston as a pilot two years prior to his playing a similar role in AIRPORT 1975. The film introduces us to the personal lives of several passengers, including a U.S. Senator (Walter Pidgeon), a jazz cellist (football legend Roosevelt Grier), a smart-mouthed teenage girl (Susan Dey from The Partridge Family), and a very pregnant lady (Mariette Hartley, who used to do those cute Polaroid commercials with James Garner)who probably shouldn't be flying to begin with at this late stage. There's also an unusually twitchy Vietnam vet on board (hammily played by James Brolin) which should remove all doubt as to who is leaving scary notes on the bathroom mirror and threatening to blow up the plane if his demand to be flown to Moscow isn't met. Yvette Mimieux and Leslie Uggams appear as two of the best-looking flight attendants in aviation history (they were called stewardesses back then, but then again that was a time when you could also smoke openly on a commercial airplane.) TV's Claude Akins shows up in the control tower, essentially playing George Kennedy. This sounds pretty ridiculous, and in some ways it is, but director John Guillermin (The Blue Max, The Towering Inferno) keeps up a brisk pace and makes this quite watchable, for what it is.

"Skyjacked" is another disaster movie from the 1970's but the main difference is that the casting is not so famous and the story doesn't take too much time to happen. Charlton Heston plays the captain of an airplane dealing with a risky passenger and his bomb. Following the model of "Airport" in its plot this movie also has the background of some of the characters but it was added during the flight in some weak flashbacks. That was good because the major audience gets easily bored with the long beginning of "Airport" whose airplane took almost an hour to take off. Here the airplane gets up in the air in five minutes and most of the characters were already presented. It had a great beginning but was trapped with a poor ending. Once again the kidnapper of the plane dies and everyone is saved just like in "Airport". By the way I think that in every movie involving airplanes hijacked the hijackers are killed (except for the woman in "Passenger 57" who was arrested). But at least the movie created a certain intrigue in not telling who was the hijacker. Threats starts to appear in the bathroom, then a paper telling to land in some place in Alaska, and then we find out who is. One thing that bothered me is that it was only a lunatic war veteran (played by James Brolin) who wanted take the plane to Moscow for nothing. The good thing is the casting who has a fine performance of Heston (playing the heroic captain), Brolin has some good moments, Susan Dey (in her first film), veteran actor Walter Pidgeon (plays a senator), Roosevelt Grier (the friendly black guy carrying the cello who sits next to the hijacker) and Yvette Mimieux. And of course the funny exaggerations of the story: There's a pregnant woman in her last months of pregnancy on the flight; the senator smoking calmly on the plane after the disaster started; the excessive close-up shots showing a lipstick in the beginning of the movie (this is explained later throughout the movie); and some other moments. Nothing so laughable but funny anyway. Entertaining and enjoyable to any aviation buff. 7/10

I stumbled on this movie on TCM one slow afternoon and was surprised I never heard of it with so many big names in the cast. I can see why the director, John Guillermin, didn't do anything substantial after this lame duck. Even the most rudimentary aviation credibility is lost in this film, from the ridiculous flying skills obviously exaggerated for the movie, to the laughable aviation radio-speak, and finally the cockpit not even close to resembling anything like a Boeing 707.The plot is full of holes large enough to fly a 707 through. Like the Soviet fighters didn't know the airliner was 'civilian' until Charlton Heston drops the landing gear. Huh? Does anyone know how many miles it is from Anchorage to Moscow? Almost 4500! And I didn't even know James Brolin could over-act to this degree. I could go on and on but won't.My tolerance for 1970's disaster movies is fairly high but this movie is totally intolerable to the point of laughable. And what's with the flashbacks?! Did the script mandate all the profanity and silly dialogue? It's almost as though the director wanted to make "an adult film" and used profanity to prove the point.