Good start, but then it gets ruined

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

A passenger plane is skyjacked.If Chuck Heston were not in this, you might confuse Skyjacked as a TV movie rather than a feature. But yes, it is a feature film.The great acting from the whole cast makes this movie a must-see.The first 50 minutes is filled with suspense as we are never totally sure who the bad guy is, but once the cat is out of the bag, the film is a bit routine.The movie would have been better if the plane remained in the air for the whole flick, once we are on the ground the danger element is lowered.Airport (1970) was like this film in a few ways but that movie had a powerful music score playing over it, the Skyjacked score is so low- key you don't even notice it.

Commercial airliner piloted by Charlton Heston is hijacked by someone claiming to have a bomb. Whether you consider it a knockoff of Airport or not, it's very much in the same vein as that film and its sequels. I see IMDb gives away the identity of the hijacker in their summary which is weird since the first 40 minutes of the movie is about that mystery. No spoilers here though.Full of the stereotypical cast you might expect from an Airport movie: the pilot and stewardess who used to have a thing (Charlton Heston, Yvette Mimieux), aging stars (Walter Pidgeon, Jeanne Crain), up-and-coming youngsters (Susan Dey and future Spider-Man Nicholas Hammond), professional athlete (Rosie Greer), pregnant lady (Mariette Hartley), and a troubled soldier (James Brolin). The tension aboard the plane is pretty good but the dated flashback sequences are silly. Not bad of its type. First 45 minutes or so is best. If you like the Airport movies you'll surely like this.

Another Seventies Disaster, a Disaster Movie that Viewers Today Love to Poke Fun and some even call these Things Camp Classics. But in 1972 it was a Stinker and no Amount of Glossing Over its Inanities could make it anything more than a Boring Bunch of Passengers on board a Commercial Flight with a Former Military Pilot hoping to keep Control of "His" Airplane from a Nutjob Determined to Fill Two Hours of Screen Time with Clichéd Scene Chewing among the Clichéd People that Populate these Things.Bland, Hardly Exciting Waste of Time Watching Blurry Flashbacks that Attempt to Add Weight to the Proceedings and come off as nothing more than Sopa Opera Filler. There isn't an Interesting Character Aboard of the 100 Souls and the Tension is too Choreographed and Badly Edited to Amount to Much. This is Anything but Sure Handed Filmmaking. What's with all the Zooms to the Lipstick Counter, wouldn't One be Enough. The Movie has got no Heart and no Intrigue and Yes, it may be Laughable but at the Expense of Your Wasted Time and Trying to get Any Fun from this is Futile. It is just Plain Bad from the Awkward Beginning to the Overly Staged Ending.

Considering the popularity of the disaster-movie heyday of the 1970s, it’s surprising that I took so long to catch this one; perhaps I thought that, having already watched AIRPORT 1975 (1974), made it somewhat redundant. Truth be told, I taped it twice off TV (both local and Cable, though always in pan-and-scan) – but only managed to get to it via Warners’ bare-bones DVD (released as part of a batch of “Cult Camp Classics”, which also included the similarly airborne flick ZERO HOUR! [1957]). This was also Charlton Heston’s introduction to the genre – he would follow it with EARTHQUAKE (1974), the aforementioned AIRPORT 1975, TWO-MINUTE WARNING (1976) and GRAY LADY DOWN (1978): all of these apart from the first one, I was only familiar with via a childhood viewing on Italian TV but, since I own the lot on DVD-R, I now opted to include the last three in my ongoing Heston tribute.Anyway, the film itself isn’t too bad as these things go (in the AIRPORT [1970] mold yet anticipating, in fact emerging as slightly superior to, any of the sequels) – but, having watched it, I can’t say that the epithet of “Camp” was too far off in its case! This has to do as much with the dated feel of it all (the look, the soundtrack, the politics) as the contrived melodramatics of the plot (married pilot Heston has had a fling with stewardess Yvette Mimieux – his kid sister from DIAMOND HEAD [1963]! – whose new beau is, of all people, the co-pilot…and, amid this soap opera stuff, he has to contend with an unbalanced soldier – an eye-rolling showcase for James Brolin – who threatens the plane with a bomb because he wants to defect to Russia!). The brief flashes to the corny Heston/Mimieux romance and Brolin’s back-story (whose deranged state-of-mind eventually transforms into a fantasy sequence depicting his reception by the Soviets!) add to the fun factor.The solid MGM production managed a fair name cast (a given for this type of film, going back to the grand-daddy of them all – THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY [1954]): also appearing in the film are Claude Akins (in a one-scene role as a George Kennedy/Joe Patroni wannabe, guiding the plane-in-peril towards a safe landing in Alaska), Walter Pidgeon (as an elderly Senator whose destination, a fishing trip with his teenage son, is diverted by a direct call from the U.S. President!), Jeanne Crain (as a passenger whose shaky relationship with her husband is saved when he uncharacteristically decides to turn heroic and confronts Brolin) and Roosevelt “Rosey” Grier (as a cello-playing jazz musician who, sitting next to Brolin, is first alerted to his disturbed personality – ironically, it was Heston’s personal intervention that won Brolin a seat on the plane in the first place!).Of course, it all ends badly for Brolin – as he finds the Russians aren’t as willing to obtain his services as he had anticipated; just as predictably, Heston – who has to take a lot of crap, and a good trashing, from Brolin during the flight – stays behind to fight for his plane…which he does almost at the cost of his own life. For the record, director Guillermin would go on to co-direct what turned out to be perhaps the definitive disaster epic of the age – THE TOWERING INFERNO (1974); incidentally, I’ve just acquired one of the two novels on which that film was based and, besides, I need to pick up its 2-Disc “Special Edition” re-issue – as well as the equivalent one for another touchstone of the genre, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972) – which I’ve been postponing long enough already...