Serial Killer Ray Liotta Fights a One-Sided War of Wills with Dim-Witted Flight Attendant Lauren Holly in the Gloriously Trashy 1997 Die Hard Knock Off Turbulence
because of all the killing!
In an epic humblebrag, Jonathan Brett, the screenwriter of 1997’s Turbulence conceded of a script that netted him over a million dollars, "I don't know what I was thinking. I mean, it makes no sense, characters act like imbeciles, the dialogue is pedestrian... but they threw millions my way. I guess I should be happy.”
Brett is not guilty of false humility. For lack of a better word, the script for Turbulence fucking sucks. Its heroine is Teri Halloran, a Basic Betty/Proto-Karen with all the personality and blinding whiteness of a Yankee Candle outlet at a strip mall. The third act is only slightly less silly and ridiculous than Airplane!, which is strange, considering that it’s not a comedy.
The film’s unexpectedly venomous IMDB trivia isn’t done firing shots in the film’s direction. It goes on to observe, “Studio records claim that this film cost $55 million (and grossed less than $3 million) yet it features no top flight name stars in its cast, has only one not particularly expensive main set (the airliner interior) and only has one big action sequence. All of which suggest it could/should have been made for $25 million or less.”
I could be wrong but it sounds like an anonymous muckraker is accusing the production of funny business and/or money laundering. Or maybe Turbulence overpaid everybody as wildly as its screenwriter, and flew extras to the set in a private helicopter and paid them 50,000 thousand dollars a day.
Brett’s massive payday is even more bewildering in light of the script’s derivativeness. Turbulence is essentially “Die Hard on a plane.” That would be shameless even if 1992’s Passenger 57 wasn’t already “Die Hard on a Plane.”
Instead of a tough, smart, convincing hero played by a black, male action star Turbulence substitutes a weak, dim-witted white woman played by Lauren Holly in a performance that set women in action movies back decades.
Needless to say, that is not an improvement. Turbulence opens with Ryan Weaver (Ray Liotta) buying a teddy bear for his girlfriend on Christmas Day. In another context this would be wholesome but since Ray Liotta is the star of Turbulence we intuitively know that the punishingly intense man procuring the stuffed animal is probably a sick motherfucker who has raped and/or killed and will rape and kill again if not stopped.
That is of course the case. Ryan is a silver-tongued serial killer who is a ladykiller in both the figurative and literal sense, having killed and sexually assaulted five women. He professes to be innocent but then prisons are full of “innocent” men who are guilty as fuck, like our boy Ryan.
Law enforcement, led by a tough cop with a vendetta played by Hector Elizondo, pounces and arrests the sexy serial killer. He’s placed on a commercial flight on Christmas alongside Stubbs, a hillbilly lunatic with a cartoonishly thick Southern accent played by a scenery-chewing Brendan Gleason.
I did not realize that Gleason was even in Turbulence, let alone channeling his inner Boss Hog as a country-fried scoundrel with a psychotic gleam in his eyes. This was a delightful bonus but I was bummed when Gleason leaves just as unexpectedly as he arrived, about a half hour into the proceedings.
Before dying Stubbs kicks things into high gear by killing his captor, stealing his gun and then instigating a deadly shootout that leaves multiple people dead and the plane without a pilot.
These scoundrels are flying commercial and I have to say that I would be VERY peeved if I bought a plane ticket and discovered that one of my fellow passengers murdered five people and would clearly love to add to his body count.
I don’t care if you get free drinks and complimentary peanuts and pretzels; being within murdering distance of a prolific murderer would be a deal breaker. When Gleason is over-acting Turbulence has the joyfully bootleg vibe of a mini-Con Air.
When Stubbs bites the big one, however, Turbulence turns into a one man show, with Liotta cranking it up to 11 in a performance that gets bigger and bigger and bigger until he’s more cartoonish than a cartoon and crazier than crazy.
But until the mask conclusively comes off and the airborne mass murderer lustily embraces his own outsized villainy he at first attempts to seduce our half-assed heroine with honeyed words.
It doesn’t matter to Ryan that he’s on his way to Death Row for murdering a basketball starting line up worth of beautiful women. Our villain shoots his shot anyway.
Early in the film Teri observes that Ray Liotta’s character doesn’t LOOK like a murderer. That made me laugh out loud because Liotta’s type was “wild-eyed, unhinged, possibly coke-addicted maniac who DEFINITELY might have killed someone.”
Ryan is a silver tongued devil of Satanic evil who initially attempts to pass himself off to Teri as an innocent man who was framed and wants to do everything in his power to land the plane safely.
Because she is very, very stupid, and also gullible in a child-like manner, Teri at first imagines that Ryan might be on the level, at least about not wanting everyone on the flight to die
She’s wrong. DEAD wrong. The serial killer with the aggressive disdain for the dignity of human life, and human beings in general, wants everyone dead and is VERY prepared to kill them all himself if that’s what it takes.
At a certain point in Turbulence Liotta goes mythic, willfully discards his own humanity and turns into The Big Bad Wolf of fairy tale fame, with our overmatched and dim-witted heroine serving as his Little Red Riding Hood.
In its third act Turbulence turns into a b-movie fever dream exploring the disaster-movie-friendly question, “Can an everyday maroon with no experience successfully land a plane?”
It falls to Teri to save the day and land the plane despite barely being intelligent and competent enough to handle ANY job, let alone one that requires to successfully out-wit a brilliant sociopath WHILE landing a plane in stormy weather.
A veteran pilot played by Ben Cross talks the nervous flight attendant through the process, understandably talking to her as if she’s a frazzled, easily confused child and not a colleague.
Like its second sequel, Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal, Turbulence is an entertainingly terrible b-movie utterly at ease with its own trashiness. An appropriately larger than life turn from an ideally typecast Liotta makes the movie entertaining. Holly and the screenplay ensure it’s terrible.
Turbulence bombed at the box-office but like so many projects Liotta was involved with, it enjoyed a surprising and robust second life. It was a huge hit on home video and picked up a big enough cult to spawn a pair of direct to video sequels.
This is pure trash but at least it’s trash with energy and vulgarity, the rough, raw essence of life.
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