I was prepared to report that I had seen my first Steven Seagal movie tonight. I was prepared to report that I hated this movie. I saw Kurt Russell in top billing. I saw Oliver Platt supporting. And I saw 2 hours 25 minutes as the run time. I had it all worked out. I would say, "The acting was pathetic, the plot ludicrous, the suspense flat." I would call this, "HEAT meets PASSENGER 57."

The beginning of the movie conformed to my expectations. It starts with a covert operation commanded by Seagal. Immediately, I was turned off by the appearance of computer teletype titles bleeping across the screen identifying the location, the mission, the time and date, and the individuals involved. It took forever for all that data to display. The scene that followed _was_ well done. But the next few scenes bothered me enormously. The sound was too loud, the editing was confusing. And those annoying titles kept bleeping across the screen in the most redundant fashion. For instance, you see a shot of the Acropolis; the titles bleep "ATHENS, GREECE." You see a shot of the Pentagon; the titles bleep "NATIONAL DEFENSE HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON D.C." The point of view jumped around like a flea, packing in a load of setup that probably could have been pared down.

What's the setup? The US abducts an Arab terrorist; his buddies respond by blowing apart a London restaurant and hi-jacking an American jet-liner. Kurt Russell, head of an anti-terrorism think-tank, is called in to help size up the bad guys. He points out that the terrorists are likely to have a stolen shipment of Soviet nerve gas on-board which they probably plan to detonate upon landing in Washington D.C., regardless of whether or not their demands are met. The plane can't be allowed to land. The only option outside of shooting it down is for Seagal and his team to sneak into the plane in mid-flight using a specially-fitted prototype Stealth aircraft. Once inside, the commandos would disarm the nerve-gas bomb, pacify the terrorists and return the American souls safely to their hearths.

I started liking the movie during the docking sequence. Everything up to that point made me think the sequence would be overblown and overdone, riding on its own clever glory rather than the merit of realistically rendered danger. I was wrong. It was a pretty cool scene that became complicated and changed my expectations for the movie from then on. I suddenly expected EXECUTIVE DECISION to be good... and it got better.

Now I'm not saying this is a great work of cinema here. There's a healthy dose of Hollywood formula in the plot. And the audience laughed in a bunch of places where comedy was not intended. But overall, the screws were tightened so skillfully during the course of the movie, the audience was cheering at the climax. The two hours, twenty-five minutes went by in a flash.

The performances are exactly what you expect from this kind of cast in this kind of movie. Considering the last thing I saw Kurt Russell in was STARGATE, I have to say he was... greatly improved. John Leguizamo was noteworthy as one of the sharp-edged commandos in Seagal's corp. And you can't have a movie like this without a great bad guy - David Suchet delivers.

I was happy to see the dramatics stayed relatively tame and realism was attempted as much as possible. While this isn't as realistic as, say, APOLLO 13, it's not TRUE LIES either. And EXECUTIVE DECISION did put in a few lines to counter the idea of Islam as a hateful religion: The second-in-command tells the chief bad guy that he wants have no part in the suicide mission because, "This is not what Allah wants. Your hate has made you blind."

EXECUTIVE DECISION delivers substantial bang for the buck. I'm not sure how it will play on the small screen, so if you're interested, I'd say catch it in the theater.

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