This is not the Love Boat heading to Fantasy Island. There's enough drama in a 5-hour flight to Hawaii, and a lot of it is truly idiotic. The script goes way over the top in many of its plot devices, some of them silly, many of them melodramatic and the overall atmosphere of this TV movie downright camp. Of course you got an all-star cast of faces familiar to TV audiences in the mid-1980's, and if they had gone ahead and made this into a primetime soap opera, I bet it could have scrambled out at least a season.
The overwrought Bixby is such as a misogynist that he objects to the addition of Connie Selleca to the traffic controller staff, having rants that would in real life have him instantly committed. Airport manager Gil Gerard and his assistant (Berlinda Tolbert) have their hands full, not only with Bixby, but Robin Greer's obvious crush on Gerard that would certainly be considered sexual harassment today. Then there's the presence of a note that indicates there's a bomb aboard their flight to Hawaii.
Cute kid Danny Ponce is an orphan who wants to be adopted by none other than George Kennedy, making another appearance in an airport movie, although he's playing a different character this time around. Ponce is a homeless kid who hangs out at the airport pestering people to shine their shoes for a few dollars here and there, and when he finds out that Kennedy's plane is in jeopardy, he goes into panic himself.
A subplot involving Robert Reed and his estranged wife seems extraneous, and he's not even a staff member or on the Hawaiian flight. Vera Miles and George Grizzard have a storyline involving an unsettled score, and pilot Robert Vaughan is the frazzled pilot on the Hawaiian flag. The plot line involving the bomb scare is the stupidest twist in any of the airplane films, and that goes all the way to 1939's "Five Came Back". Still, it's ridiculous soapy fun that succeeds mainly on unintentional laughs.
The overwrought Bixby is such as a misogynist that he objects to the addition of Connie Selleca to the traffic controller staff, having rants that would in real life have him instantly committed. Airport manager Gil Gerard and his assistant (Berlinda Tolbert) have their hands full, not only with Bixby, but Robin Greer's obvious crush on Gerard that would certainly be considered sexual harassment today. Then there's the presence of a note that indicates there's a bomb aboard their flight to Hawaii.
Cute kid Danny Ponce is an orphan who wants to be adopted by none other than George Kennedy, making another appearance in an airport movie, although he's playing a different character this time around. Ponce is a homeless kid who hangs out at the airport pestering people to shine their shoes for a few dollars here and there, and when he finds out that Kennedy's plane is in jeopardy, he goes into panic himself.
A subplot involving Robert Reed and his estranged wife seems extraneous, and he's not even a staff member or on the Hawaiian flight. Vera Miles and George Grizzard have a storyline involving an unsettled score, and pilot Robert Vaughan is the frazzled pilot on the Hawaiian flag. The plot line involving the bomb scare is the stupidest twist in any of the airplane films, and that goes all the way to 1939's "Five Came Back". Still, it's ridiculous soapy fun that succeeds mainly on unintentional laughs.