Air Force One (film)/Awesome

Harrison Ford as the President of the USA. Recipe for Awesome.

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• Upon dispatching Ivan

Marshall: "Get off my plane!"

• Halo Two's Taking the Bullet for Air Force One. Quite apart from being a ridiculously brave act, the sheer skill and timing required surely put that 'Eagle driver' on the same tier of airmanship as Wedge Antilles and Hoban Washburne!
  • And then the Kazakh pilot's victory roll is punctuated by Halo Lead's Sidewinder. This troper hasn't growled "Yeah!" that loud since Aragorn felled Lurtz.

Halo Lead: Not so fast, you son of a bitch.

• When the President has been rescued:

The president is on board! (cheering follows) Wait. Correction (groans follows) Liberty-24 is changing call signs--Liberty-24 is now Air Force One!

• Really, the whole sequence with Halo Flight rescuing the plane qualifies from the Vice President's order to "order our fighters back into their airspace. Order them to use any and all means to protect the President" to the "OH SHIT!" the MIG pilots display when the Flight shows up. Awesome.
• When the Russian soldiers gun down Radek and company just before they leave on a helicopter.
• Hey, what about the woman who, after the phones have all been disabled, suggests using the fax machine to get a message out, and for which the President promises her a promotion to Postmaster General. (The huge smile on her face when her suggestion does work and she is parachuting to safety, probably also qualifies as a Crowning Moment of Funny, as well.)
• Jim Brass takes a bullet to the gut for the president. Certain death, right? WRONG: At the end of the film, during the rescue mission right after the president's wife and daughter have safely been transferred to Liberty 2-4, the President insists that he should be offloaded next because of his severe bullet wound, and is ultimately the only survivor of the rescue outside of the president's family. In other words, saving the president = survival.
• Pretty much all of the president's fights against the terrorists, especially the first one, whom he knocks out by hitting in the face with a friggin STOOL (and then kills with a headshot after he gets up thirty seconds later), and of course Korshunov, whom he kills by wrapping a strap around his neck, pulling open the parachute he was wearing, and finally throws him out of the plane (after the legendary Pre-Mortem One-Liner at the top of the page), snapping his neck.
• The cable's about to snap and there's only time for one more trip from the soon-to-crash plane to Liberty 2-4, and Maj. Caldwell insists the President go; the President won't hear of going until Caldwell and George Mason are safe. At which point Caldwell gets his own Awesome Moment (making it even worse when the traitorous Mason^[1] FREAKING KILLS HIM SECONDS LATER!):

Caldwell: Mr. President - it's time to go.

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Back to Air Force One (film)

1. ↑ who winds up going down with the plane anyway