Director: Ken Finkleman
Cast: Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Lloyd Bridges, William Shatner
Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. An extended cameo from Shatner actually led me to prefer this over the original Airplane! (1980) when I was a kid.
Did I Like It: But kids are idiots. Everything is tired here. The jokes are the same. Anything new is mostly jam-packed into the film’s opening minutes. I caught myself laughing at the courtesy van for Air Iran, even though it’s not a great joke, per se. Jokes about Ronald Reagan’s senility work now, but I can’t give extra credit for something being accidentally funnier than it had any right to originally be.
Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, and even Kareem Abdul-Jabbar steer clear, and it’s not exactly like Sonny Bono is an adequate consolation prize. Those that remain try their best to keep things breezy, but they are largely repeating old gags with only the slightest variation. Hagerty understands the assignment and remains adorable, while there are several times Hays looks at the camera, as if to beg us not to make the film a success to keep him from the threatened indignities of an Airplane III.
And yet…
The parts with Shatner still kind of hold up. He’s playing a character similar enough to Kirk that we all get the joke, but different enough that Paramount would have to cut one more check to Roddenberry. It’s largely some tame gags, but he is game and understands we’re laughing at him more than with him. He’s at the heights of his cinematic charms, having also had Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) under his belt earlier in the year. I’ll be honest, my most guileless laugh in the whole movie came when Shatner’s character was gently shoved into the outer orbit of a nervous breakdown at the sight of a glass tube with an array of blinking red lights. Those things were built for The Wrath of Khan but are recognizable to any Trek fan for being reused ad infinitum for decades in the franchise.