In 1996’s Executive Decision, terrorists hijack an airplane.  Their leader, Nagi Hassan (David Suchet) demands that the U.S. government not only give him and his men safe passage but that they also release Hassan’s commander, Jaffa (Andreas Katsulas).

In Washington D.C., it is decide to use a stealth plane to transport Col. Austin Travis (Steven Seagal) and his men into the passenger plane.  Accompanying them will be Dr. David Grant (Kurt Russell), a consultant for U.S. Intelligence.  Dr. Grant is the world’s leading expert on Hassan, even though neither he nor anyone else is even sure what Hassan looks like.  Travis distrusts Grant because he’s a civilian and also because he holds Grant responsible for a botched raid on a Russian safehouse in Italy.  Dr. Grant is going to have to prove himself to Col. Travis because Travis doesn’t have any time for people who can’t get the job done.  And Travis is determined to get on that plane and save all those passengers.

In other words, Travis is a typical Steven Seagal character and, for the first fourth of this movie, Seagal gives a typical Steven Seagal performance.  He delivers his line in his trademark intimidating whisper, he glares at everyone else in the film, and essentially comes across as being a total douchebag who can still handle himself in a fight..  However, when it’s time to board the airplane through a docking tunnel, something goes wrong.  Everyone — even nervous engineer Dennis Cahill (Oliver Platt) is able to slip through the stealth plane’s docking tunnel and get into the hijacked airplane cargo hold without being detected.  But the two planes are hit by severe turbulence.  Suddenly, it becomes apparent the one man is going to have to sacrifice his life and close the hatch before the docking tunnel decompresses.

David, already in the cargo hold, looks down at Austin in the tunnel.  “We’re not going to make it!”

“You are!” Austin replies before slamming the hatch shut and getting sucked out of the tunnel.  (There’s your Oscar Cheers Moment of 1996!)  After all that build-up, Steven Seagal exits the film early and now, it’s up to Kurt Russell and what’s left of Austin Travis’s men to somehow stop the terrorists.  Not only do they have to stop Hassan but they also have to do it before the Air Force — which has no way of knowing whether or not any of their men were able to get on the plane before the tunnel fell apart — shoots down the airliner.

(If the airplane looks familiar, that’s because Lost used the same stock footage whenever it flashed back to the plane crash that started the show.)

It’s actually a rather brilliant twist.  When this film came out, Seagal was still a film star.  He played characters who always got the job done and who were basically infallible.  He wasn’t a very good actor but he did manage to perfect an intimidating stare and that stare carried him through a lot of movies.  No one would have expected Seagal to die within the first 30 minutes of one of his movies and when Col. Travis, who the film has gone out of its way to portray as being the consummate warrior, is suddenly killed, there really is a moment where you find yourself wondering, “What are they going to do now?”  In just a matter of minutes, Executive Decision goes from being a predictable Steven Seagal action film to a genuinely exciting and clever Kurt Russell thriller.  For once, Russell is not playing a man of action.  He’s an analyst, a thinker.  And, to the film’s credit, he uses his mind more than his brawn to battle Hassan’s terrorists.  With excellent support from Halle Berry (as a flight attendant who discreetly helps out David and the soldiers), Oliver Platt, B.D. Wong, Whip Hubley,  David Suchet, Joe Morton, and even John Leguizamo (as Travis’s second-in-command), Executive Decision reveals itself to be an exciting and ultimately rewarding thrill ride.

And to think, all it took was sacrificing Steven Seagal.