Air Force One

There might not be a better accomplishment than to make a movie that has cynics like us want to stand up and chant "USA, USA!" Wolfgang Petersen's Air Force One does just that. Harrison Ford's dogged toughness and his humanity as perhaps the most-popular president in film history is the key here, but the rest of the large cast (especially Gary Oldman as a Russian terrorist) is pretty great too. There are also surprisingly timely echoes of many recent real-life events. In fact, here's a warning for those who don't want to hear us rip on a certain golf-obsessed Floridian: skip ahead a few minutes at the 13-minute mark. But this movie doesn't even need any of these shreds of verisimilitude. It's just a wonderfully entertaining thriller that makes you want to go back to the beginning and watch it again! We also opened up the comment bag at the end of this 449th Ellises' Analysis, which brought about a pretty big announcement. So while a dozen different terrible things are happening in the country that celebrates the 4th of July, enjoy our talk about Petersen & Ford's "smart dumb" movie. To do that even better, get yourself a plane-load of Sparkplug Coffee. They'll give you a 20% discount if you use our promo code ("top100project"). You can also tweet us (@moviefiend51 and @bevellisellis) and you should seek out Ryan's sports movie podcast ("Scoring At The Movies").