Drop Zone (1994) and Extreme Sports in Film

Collins English Dictionary defines the term “Extreme Sport” as “a sport that is physically hazardous, such as bungee jumping or snowboarding.”  That is a really broad term that can be used to cover many different sports.  Most sports are physically hazardous in one way or another.  Football involves tackling and broken bones.  Hockey involves body checking and possible hits with sticks.  Soccer and baseball have cleats that could tear up a shin if they make contact, which they sometimes do.  Each of these physical hazards could fall under the definition of extreme sports, yet the sports don’t.  Extreme sports are considered dangerous by nature, and not by other people playing the sports with you.  And that’s the big difference.

I know I started this post off like a cliché best man speech at a wedding.  The only reason I did that is to help separate the extreme sports from the rest, since this week’s movie involves an extreme sport.  Drop Zone was one of the many 1990s and 2000s movies that took an extreme sport and used it in the film in order to try and be more hip or cool for the audiences.  In this case, the 1994 film starring Wesley Snipes took skydiving and incorporated it into a crime story.  U.S. Marshall Pete Nessip (Wesley Snipes) is transporting convict Earl Leedy (Michael Jeter) between prisons when the plane they are on is attacked by Ty Moncrief (Gary Busey).  The attacker takes Leedy by skydiving out of the plane and uses him to steal undercover agents’ identities from government facilities.  Pete Nessip must track down the thieves by learning to skydive from Jessie Crossman (Yancy Butler).  Other stars include Corin Nemec, Kyle Secor, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, and Mickey Jones.

As I said, the 1990s and 2000s were two decades where many movies tried to capitalize upon a rising interest in extreme sports.  In fact, Drop Zone wasn’t even the only skydiving movie to come out in 1994.  Three months earlier, a movie called Terminal Velocity was released which saw Charlie Sheen playing a skydiving instructor in a spy action movie.  Something in 1992 or 1993 had spawned the idea that skydiving would make for good action, and that idea has never disappeared from the minds of screenwriters.  More recent movies like 2007’s Shoot ‘Em Up and 2013’s Iron Man Three used people falling from planes as elements of their action sequences.  It might not always work (the concept is very dependent on effects, due to the concept being life-threateningly dangerous for an actor to perform), but skydiving is used again and again in movies.

Another movie that comes to mind when I think of extreme sports in movies is a film called Extreme Ops.  The 2002 action thriller starring Devon Sawa, Rufus Sewell, Rupert Graves, and Bridgette Wilson featured a group of extreme sports enthusiasts who travel to the Alps for some snowboarding and stuff.  They stumble upon a war criminal who tries to kill them for finding him.  The movie mostly involves snowboarding, which might be the most popular of all extreme sports.  Well, either that or skateboarding.  They’re very similar, as is surfing.  But I’ll get to those later.  Extreme Ops is filled with stunts involving snowboarding and was meant to gain an audience from the teens and 20-somethings who watched the X Games for snowboarding, or enjoyed snowboarding themselves.  Other movies that have used snowboarding throughout the years are 2004’s Most Xtreme Primate, 1998’s Jack Frost (the Michael Keaton one), and some 2008 Tom Green movie called Shred.

Moving onto skateboarding, it might be the extreme sport most represented in movies.  There are a lot of different movies with skateboarding because it is such an easily accessible sport for people.  It is easy enough to come across a skateboard that most anyone can do it.  The one movie that most people probably want me to mention here is Back to the Future since the franchise features a skateboarding scene in each installment.  But those movies aren’t about the skateboarding.  They aren’t about the “extreme sport” that isn’t really all that extreme.  They simply feature a character who uses a skateboard.  More recently (if you call the mid-2000s recently), there were a couple of movies that were about skateboarding.  In 2003, audiences were given the comedy Grind, about four aspiring skateboarders trying to go pro.  2005 saw the release of Lords of Dogtown, a telling of the rise of skateboarding as a sport.  This is one sport that has only really risen in movies, and never fallen.  It is always there, whether in the forefront, or looming in the background.

Surfing, however, never really broke through as a movie sport.  Sure, there have been big splashes made by surfing in movies, with films like 1991’s Point Break and 2002’s Blue Crush coming out over the years.  Even more recently than that, there was 2006’s Surf School and 2012’s Chasing Mavericks.  Yet it’s not a sport that really sticks with people.  Much like skydiving, it has been better served as the backdrop or an action set-piece, rather than the crux of the movie.  As silly as the scene is, the moment in Escape From LA in which Snake surfs is one of the more memorable parts of the movie because the surfing isn’t played out.  It happens in that one scene and that is it.  There is no need to drag the extreme nature of it over the entire film.  Give one shot of adrenaline with it and move on, instead of dragging it out so any of the extreme elements are neutered by abundance.

Racing is another sport sometimes considered extreme, but I’m going to skip that one since racing is such a bigger beast than most of these sports I’m looking at.  I’m going to move onto climbing.  Now, I don’t mean kids climbing trees, or someone climbing something to get away from someone else.  When climbing is considered an extreme sport, it is the climbing of cliffs or mountains.  Stuff like that is extreme because one wrong move means falling to your death, or to serious injury.  The best representation of the extreme nature of climbing is 2003’s Touching the Void, a documentary (with re-enactments) about two climbers who try to climb a mountain in South America only to face life threatening situations.  It’s tense and exciting.  It is exactly what a movie about climbing should be.  The movie still stands as the pinnacle of extreme climbing in movies.  It wasn’t the first and wasn’t the last, but I would stand by it being the best.  Other movies that featured climbing of this sort, whether prominently or in small doses, were the 2000 movie Mission: Impossible II, 1993’s Cliffhanger (the former namesake for an amusement park ride at Canada’s Wonderland, much like Drop Zone), and 1975’s The Eiger Sanction, starring Clint Eastwood.  More recently, the 2009 Australian horror flick The Loved Ones and the 2013 action movie GI Joe: Retaliation featured prominent climbing moments.  There’s something about climbing that works for movies in ways that other extreme sports seem to not work.  For some reason, it is tenser when you’re watching someone climb than when you see them surfing.

As I have mentioned numerous times in this post, extreme sports are a good way to infuse a movie with action.  They are a shot of adrenaline that keeps the pulse of the audience racing when a movie needs it.  They are a perfect way to get everyone back into a movie if it has been lacking excitement.  Or they are a great way to heighten the stakes and tension that has been built up to that point in the film.  They don’t tend to work completely as the main plot point in a movie, but they make for some great action sequences.  Drop Zone suffers a little bit for being so much about skydiving.  The idea of skydiving to pull off crimes is an interesting one, yet the buildup of the main character learning to skydive in order to better understand the criminals provided some weaker moments in the movie.  Had there been a mixture of extreme athletics (as in Point Break) or just less skydiving all around, the crime movie would have felt a little tighter.  Still entertaining though, and I do appreciate that much.

Extreme sports haven’t been quite as prevalent in this decade as the two previous, but they are still there.  I mentioned a few movies featuring moments of extreme sport that have come from the past five years.  And with the Point Break remake coming out later this year, extreme sports could make a huge comeback.  All that is needed is a new extreme sport, and there will be movies made that shoehorn it into the plot.  I can’t wait for the day when we get Deep Zone and Terminal Buoyancy, two movies within three months that are about crime that involves extreme deep sea diving.  That will be the day.

There are obviously a bunch of notes from this movie.  By a bunch, I mean a lot.  Let’s get the notes started:

• Drop Zone was suggested to me by @nickissac.
• You already know that Wesley Snipes was the star of Drop Zone.  He was also in Money Train.  So was an actor named Keith Leon Williams.
• Gary Busey is another actor who was already featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  He was in The Gingerdead Man.
• And the third star of the movie, Yancy Butler?  She was in Hansel and Gretel Get Baked.
• There’s an actor named Robert LaSardo in Drop Zone.  He was also in Death Race.
• Did you notice Clark Johnson in Drop Zone?  He’s one of the people from Iron Eagle II.
• How about Kimberly Scott?  She was already in the Sunday “Bad” Movies in Santa, Jr.  Now she has made her second appearance by being featured in Drop Zone.
• Finally, we come to Claire Stansfield.  She was in Drop Zone.  She was also in a movie called Steel, which seems to be coming up a lot since being featured.
• Another movis I mentioned in this post that I have already covered is Surf School.
• Have you watched Drop Zone?  Have you watched Terminal Velocity?  Have you watched any of the movies I mentioned?  Do you like extreme sports being featured in movies?  There is a comments section where you can discuss anything about this post, including how bad I am at writing.
• You can also use the comments to suggest a future movie for me to watch as a part of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Then you will be mentioned in the notes (when I watch the movie), and your name will go on my suggestors page (also when I watch the movie).  You could also suggest to me on my Twitter account or my email: sundaybadmovies@gmail.com
• Next week’s movies is Tracers, a recent Taylor Lautner flick about parkour.  Two weeks in a row, I get unconventional sports movies.  I’ve already seen the movie, and since it’s new, next week will be more of a review than anything.  See you then.