Speed isn't only the essence of "Drop Zone," it's the cream in its coffee, the sugar in its tea. This movie moves faster and feels shorter than its own preview.
Let me tell you, you put this baby on fast-forward on your VCR, there may be a nuclear explosion. Kids, remember: I'm a professional movie critic. Don't try this at home!
Anyway, the movie follows -- to the degree that it can be followed -- as defrocked federal marshal Wesley Snipes tries to prove that a bungled 747 high-jacking that disgraced him and killed his brother (also a U.S. marshal) was in reality a clever and successful prisoner-rescue mission performed by some bad-guy sky-divers.
The movie flies by so quickly that if you stop to question a single detail, by the time you get it figured out, 5,678 more details have accumulated and you're hopelessly lost. You may be hopelessly lost anyhow, but why accelerate the process by thinking? The movie believes you're too stupid to think.
Still -- would the marshals send a brother team? Is it really impossible to bail out of a 747, as the movie maintains? Why are the authorities so easily bamboozled into accepting one theory of the event?
To prove his thesis (which we of course know to be true) Snipes has to infiltrate Florida sky-diving culture and quickly comes to bond with Jessie Crossman, played by tough gal Yancy Butler. He joins her swashbuckling team of world-class divers just as they're about to take off for a big jump into D.C.
Director John Badham has lots of fun portraying sky-diving culture as something akin to fighter pilot, skiing or surfing culture: a macho/macha conflux of bodacious, beer-swilling adrenalin junkies who are all impossibly sinewy, blond and beautiful, and hang out in colorful bars. He portrays them as a special breed of brothers and sisters who've been weirdly liberated by their conquest of the tyranny of gravity. They live the No Fear lifestyle and seem to have a lot of sex. Look quickly and you'll see "Homicide" cop Kyle Secor, under a beard and a thatch of hair, as Swoop, one of the cutest and craziest.
Meanwhile, in the other half of the film, ubiquitous bad boy Gary Busey and his team -- equally picturesque, equally indecipherable -- work out their scam. It seems they liberated the prisoner -- icky little Michael Jeter -- because he was some kind of computer genius.
With him at their disposal and their unbelievably refined parachute skills, they're able to night-glide onto the roofs of law enforcement establishments, penetrate them (they're easier to get into from the roof, I guess) and use Jeter's genius to pry info out of the computer system, to be sold to drug cartels. Then they paraglide off the roof to a truck prowling the streets below.
Yeah, right. Here's an elaborate plan that seems to have accounted for every single possible possibility except for just one tiny one: Suppose someone outside the building happens to look up? I mean, night or not, the billows of parachutes are not exactly the most invisible phenomenon in the world.
The big caper on which the movie turns is even more improbable. It involves a night parachute assault on DEA headquarters in D.C., on the Fourth of July, using as cover a celebration that involves hundreds of parachutists sailing into the mall during the middle of the fireworks. Again, like, excuse me? Washington, D.C., the most liberal municipality in America, is going to let hundreds of parachuting rednecks blow into town during the middle of a fireworks?
If you can put credibility on the shelf, the movie just sort of works. Badham's best thing is that he really sells the idea of falling through space. There are at least three or four stunning sequences in which unbelievably talented and steel-nerved para-stuntmen perform incredible feats while the ground rushes up to kiss them at 300 miles an hour. In the best, a diver shucks off his parachute, swims through midair to locate an injured diver, secures him, then pops a reserve chute. Incredible stuff.
To judge the acting in the film isn't really fair. These performers aren't playing people but attitudes. Snipes is steely and tough, but his martial arts skills seem more movie stuff than real fighting. Butler is cute and showy but hardly human; Busey has been living large off the blond psycho thing since the original "Lethal Weapon."
But so crazed is "Drop Zone" that it does seem to open up some new marketing possibilities: Why not run the preview after the movie and charge admission? The ad line would be: "You've seen the movie, now enjoy the preview"!
"Drop Zone"
Starring Wesley Snipes and Gary Busey
Directed by John Badham
Released by Paramount
Rated R
** 1/2