Air America (1990)

Air America arrives in 1990 with a suspiciously cheerful poster and a plot about the CIA running heroin out of Laos. Roger Spottiswoode directs Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr. as pilots who discover their employer is a front for the drug trade, and the film treats this as material for banter. The anti-war sentiment is present, the opium trade is named, and the villainous General Soong is a recognizable stand-in for a real Laotian figure. None of it is delivered with a raised finger. The tone is loose, the flying is spectacular, and the moral accounting happens in the margins.

On the representational ledger, the film is a product of its moment and offers almost nothing to the modern auditor. The cast is white, the Hmong and Laotian characters exist as terrain and obstacle, and reviewers of the era did not fail to notice the absence of actual Hmong heroes. Nancy Travis appears as Corinne, a character who functions. There is no LGBTQ+ content, no body-positivity message, no neurodivergent characterization, and no environmental theme beyond the exhaust of a C-123. Racial consciousness is confined to the setting itself, which is to say it is not consciousness at all.

The film's mild radicalism is anti-establishment, not economic. It suggests that covert American power and criminal enterprise share a bed, which in 1990 was an unpopular thing to say aloud, and Alexander Cockburn praised it for exactly that. But the delivery is a buddy picture with a postscript about a Holiday Inn, so the sermon never arrives. Christopher Robbins disowned the adaptation. The result is a tawdry, unfunny war comedy that nonetheless smuggles a truth past the guardhouse. We have seen worse crimes committed with better manners.