Sky Riders (1976)

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Rescued by hang gliders

Businessman Jonas Bracken (Robert Culp) living in Greece comes home one day to find his wife Ellen (Susannah York) and three children kidnapped by a terrorist group. The police can seem to make no headway so Ellen’s ex-husband Jim (James Coburn) gets involved. After analyzing the background of one of the photos of the victims taken by the kidnappers he realizes that they are being held hostage inside a mountaintop monastery and the only way to get to it is by air, so he hires a crew of hang gliders to fly into the locale and rescue the family.

The film is fast-paced it gets right into the story from the very beginning and never slows down. The kids are pretty cute especially the precious little girl, which helps the viewer emphasize with their predicament and urgency to get out. The Greek locations are exotic and help give the film an extra flair.

The biggest problem is the script. The Coburn character has never hang glided before and yet somehow manages to be trained well enough in only a couple of days to fly into the steep mountaintop location without a hitch, which seemed farfetched. It also seemed highly implausible that this group of hang gliders who work at the local circus would be willing to take on such a dangerous mission or even know what to do once they landed and had to take on the gun toting bad guys. I would have expected a lot more missteps and mistakes from this novice bunch and yet they handle everything like they were a group of seasoned commandoes.

Coburn’s performance is misguided as well. Normally I love his toothy grin and throaty chuckle, but here he does it while watching the hang gliders perform at the circus even though his ex-wife and son are being held hostage. I would have thought he should have been so nervous and tense that he wouldn’t have smiled at all and been instead in a perpetually serious manner.

The scene of when they fly into the locale is done with a darkened lens to simulate nighttime, which beside being annoying makes it hard to see and lessens the dramatic effect as well as the excitement.

On the whole it’s a very basic action flick and an empty-headed one at that. The terrorist group and their ‘cause’ are quite generic and the thin plot and cardboard characters barely camouflage the fact it’s just an excuse to show off some nifty hang gliding footage and nothing more.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: March 26, 1976

Runtime: 1Hour 27Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Douglas Hickox

Studio: 20^th Century Fox

Available: DVD (Regions 1 & 2)