Worth Mentioning - A Bull That Pissed Jack Daniels

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Cody watches a movie he should have watched a long time ago.

BLUE THUNDER (1983)

An action thriller from WarGames / Stakeout director John Badham and screenwriters Dan O’Bannon (Dark Star, Alien, The Return of the Living Dead) and Dan Jakoby (Death Wish 3, Arachnophobia, Vampires, plus Lifeforce with O’Bannon), Blue Thunder was released the year I was born and was exactly the sort of movie my father would tune in to check out during his movie-watching times in the evening or that I might have caught on cable while staying at my maternal grandmothers... so it’s shocking to me that it somehow never crossed my path during my youth. I would hear about Blue Thunder, but I had never seen it. And, as it turns out, I was missing out on something really cool.

Roy Scheider stars as Frank Murphy, a helicopter pilot for the LAPD who has PTSD from his experiences in the Vietnam War and is quite concerned that he might be losing his mind. While taking his new observer, Daniel Stern as Richard Lymangood, out on his first patrol, Murphy agrees to take the newbie out of bounds... and thus is late to the scene when a city councilwoman is assaulted in her own driveway (and then killed in the resulting shootout with police). Murphy’s captain Braddock, played by the great Warren Oates, who has sadly died of a heart attack by the time this movie was released, grounds him for a couple of weeks – but his punishment only lasts a few hours, because he’s brought back in to witness a demonstration of a hi-tech and heavily armed helicopter called Blue Thunder, which happens to be piloted by a douchebag named Cochrane (Malcolm McDowell), who is responsible for the flashback-causing trauma Murphy had in Vietnam.

Cochrane doesn’t agree to Murphy being given the job, but nonetheless Murphy is chosen to pilot Blue Thunder as it makes its test runs in Los Angeles. And while Murphy and Lymangood take the helicopter around the city and put its surveillance equipment to use, they’re able to uncover a conspiracy that involves Cochrane, the officials behind the Blue Thunder program, and the death of that city councilwoman. Not liking the idea of shady characters using flying warships, Murphy steals Blue Thunder, getting help from both Lymangood and his ex-girlfriend Kate (Candy Clark) in his mission to expose the conspiracy. And put Blue Thunder out of commission.

The final 30 minutes or so of Blue Thunder’s 109 minute running time is an extended action / suspense sequence that involves Murphy flying this advanced helicopter all around Los Angeles while trying to evade the measures employed to take him down, which include other helicopters, a couple of F-16s, and even Cochrane, flying another heavily armed helicopter.

I was decades late to the party, but I had a blast watching Blue Thunder, which turned out to be an awesome, engaging, well-crafted action movie. I should have watched it before, but I will be watching it again – many more times.