BLUE THUNDER (1983)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Not until 2014's CAPTAIN AMERICA THE WINTER SOLDIER would the world see a movie that tried so hard to mitigate use a Liberal political stance to justify throwing the spotlight on the destructive power of a huge piece of law enforcement ordnance.

Frank Murphy (Roy Scheider) piloted helicopter rescue missions in Vietnam and now flies a police chopper in Los Angeles. The taciturn Murphy, who doesn't appear to play well with others, is partnered with a chatty fellow named Lymangood, apparently just to draw him out of his shell. The two witness a murder in the streets of LA but are unable to convince their superior of the murder's importance. (They also spy on a sexy girl doing yoga poses, just to make them both relatable.) The murder never really becomes a major plotline in THUNDER, but it helps establish that there's a lot of civilian criticism of police overreach, though all of the cops are good guys.

The bad guys are agents of the federal government, who are developing the technology of the super-helicopter "Blue Thunder" for use against civil disobedience and political undesirables. Murphy is tapped to fly Blue Thunder as part of a test of the ordnance in use for purposes of crowd control, though the association with the LAPD is merely the spooks' cover for their activities. The agents belatedly learn from their other pilot Cochrane (Malcolm McDowell) that Murphy may be more trouble than he's worth.

Given that Cochrane warns the agents, you would think they'd take ample precautions to conceal their agenda. But what we get is Hardy Boys 101, as Murphy and Lymangood ferret out the covert plans for Blue Thunder with ridiculous ease. Murphy then makes it his mission to expose the dirty dealings to the press. To that end he uses Blue Thunder to wage a one-man war against conventional cops before he ends up in an aerial dogfight with his old enemy Cochrane.

THUNDER is okay eighties action-fodder but often proves a little on the slow side for modern tastes, and it's certainly one of the lesser accomplishments of co-writer Dan O'Bannon. Rude though it may be, I think the movie's best legacy is having inspired the TV show AIRWOLF, whose super-helicopter was way cooler.