Turbulence

This hokum is mostly hot air, but the resulting product is relatively fair.

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Lionsgate must’ve made a pretty penny off the thriller “Fall” from a few years back as they’ve reskinned the concept as “Turbulence” (available in select theaters and on VOD beginning Friday, Dec. 12) by moving the action from an abandoned radio tower to a rogue hot air balloon. And no, this isn’t an extension of the “Turbulence” trilogy from the mid-to-late 1990s and early aughts, which kicked off as a Ray Liotta/Lauren Holly vehicle before detouring into direct-to-video land.

Zach (Jeremy Irvine, “War Horse”) is a corporate raider who’s just ousted a bunch of people from their jobs. During the party celebrating his acquisition one of the affected parties (Kevin Jarvis) confronts Zach while brandishing a pistol before turning the weapon on himself.

Despite being rich and successful things haven’t been going so swimmingly for Zach. He and his kindergarten teacher wife Emmy (Icelandic actress Hera Hilmar) have been estranged in the wake of her suffering a miscarriage. They seek to reconnect by enjoying a romantic getaway hot air ballooning through the Dolomite Mountains (these have nothing to do with Rudy Ray Moore or his Blaxploitation pictures despite pronunciation similarities) in northeastern Italy.

Their journey is captained by affable Harry (Kelsey Grammer, taking a break from laughably calling Donald Trump our greatest president), an American expat from Chicago who just loves the region’s clean air, and they get a surprise third passenger. She’s Julia (Bond girl Olga Kurylenko), whom Zach met at his hotel bar the same day he witnessed the suicide. Julia claims they slept together and is attempting to extort money from Zach lest she reveal his marital indiscretions to Emmy.

Tensions come to a boil aboard the hot air balloon and things quickly go south as the dirigible continues north.

“Turbulence” as directed by Swiss filmmaker Claudio Fäh (he’s toiled helming DTV sequels to theatrical releases such as “Hollow Man II” and “Sniper: Reloaded” and “Sniper: Ultimate Kill”) and penned by producer-turned-screenwriter Andy Mayson isn’t particularly good, but it is tensely entertaining and undeniably ridiculous. It’s well-acted and exciting despite (or possibly because of) our characters’ increasingly idiotic decisions.

More than one character in “Turbulence” is a monster, but I’d argue Emmy is the worst of the bunch – this crazy broad had the gall to put banana on a pizza. Pineapple is one thing, but this is a bridge too far!