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Airwolf review from January 1984
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AIRWOLF
With Jan-Michael Vincent, Alex Cord, Ernest Borgnine, Belinda Bauer, Eugene Roche, John Calvin, W.K. Stratton, Tina Chen, Deborah Pratt, Frank Annese, Herbert Jefferson Jr., David Hemmings, Philip Sterling, Dean Wein, Dee Dee Rescher, Philip Bruns
Supplier: Belisarius Prods. & Universal TV
Exec Producer-Director-Writer: Donald P. Bellisario
Supervising Producer: Alan J. Levi
120 Mins., Sun. (22), 9:30 p.m. CBS-TV
"Magnum, P.I.'s" guiding light, Donald P. Bellisario, is responsible for the rather fanciful pilot of "Airwolf," CBS-TV's entrant in the super-helicopter competition unleashed midway through the 1983-84 season. The pilot aired as a special Sunday (22), prior to the start of its regular run as the Saturday at 9 attraction on the web.
Comparisons with ABC-TV's "Blue Thunder" are inevitable. In "Airwolf's" favor is the rather intricate background Bellisario has concocted for his hero, a former Vietnam copter pilot who lives as a recluse by some remote lake where he communes with nature by playing the cello in order to make a rare eagle feel at ease about his presence there.
The hero, played rather stoically by Jan-Michael Vincent, thinks he's a jinx, as everybody he has loved in his life has died because of it, including a brother who has been listed as "missing in action" since Vietnam. Vincent agrees to work for a CIA-substitute organization in recapturing the super Airwolf copter, which has been stolen by its creator (David Hemmings), in return for a promise that the spy organization will find out for sure what happened to his brother.
That's a lot of motivation for one character, but the pilot went to great lengths to establish the kind of lone wolf hero Vincent was. Hemmings had taken the plane to Libya and Vincent and friend Ernest Borgnine followed to steal it away, only to find that Hemmings (in a silly plot device) was torturing the femme agent (Belinda Bauer) with whom Vincent had become involved.
The snatching of the plane was depicted as much easier than it possibly could have been in real life, Bauer and Hemmings ended up dead — and Vincent hid the plane from the spy group to insure that they kept their part of the bargain, but would fly missions with it that required extraordinary measures.
Those plot developments put "Airwolf' into the realm of sheer escapism, but did leave the door open for fanciful missions in the future. Vincent was pretty deadpan during the two hours, with Borgnine's role as an outgoing copter service operator providing an antidote to Vincent's taciturn posture. Alex Cord was quite effective in the tricky role of the spy organization's contact. Bauer was okay as the doomed agent, but Hemmings' role was written too close to that of a comic book villain.
Too much concentration on the cello-playing recluse part of Vincent's makeup could do the series in, but at least it provides the motivation for what is essentially an odd duck. "Thunder" suffers from mundane motivations; "Airwolf" could founder on too intricate motivational devices — but too much seems better than virtually none. — Bok.
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