Maidgethma Wonderfully offbeat film!

Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

DipitySkillful an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

Benas Mcloughlin Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

SnoopyStyle American military is operating a private airline in Laos during the Vietnam War. Billy Covington (Robert Downey Jr.) is a traffic copter pilot for a Los Angeles radio station. His pilot license gets suspended after he flew low to confront a driver and he gets recruited to join Air America. Veteran pilots Gene Ryack (Mel Gibson) and others show him the ropes. Major Donald Lemond and Rob Diehl from military intelligence run the operation which secretly transports drugs for corrupt General Soong. Idoit Senator Davenport arrives on a tour of the mission.This tries to be MASH but it doesn't have the humor. It tries to look into the ridiculousness of this world. I don't find many laughs. Ryack is a smuggler but it's not some fun wacky schemes. It makes him less lovable. Covington is the irreverent earnest young man. The duo sorta works sometimes. The movie doesn't quite work as a satire and it doesn't work as realism.

Geoffrey DeLeons This film has all the bells and whistles, but in the end, it is a very obvious and blatant attempt to make light of content that is extremely serious ie: war, civilian deaths, covert ops, drug and gun running. In Air America, we see good acting, a cohesive plot and lots of action involving airplanes, but compared to the movie Con Air, we never really are able to relate to any of the characters in Air America (if you do relate with the pilots, I certainly don't want to know you).Frankly, this movie makes me sick in the way that the movie MASH and Good Morning Vietnam did: Hollywood's attempts to get some laughs out of the horror that is war. In Air America, moreover, we not only see war, but the seedy underbelly of the U.S. political war machine that is the C.I.A. and U.S.A.I.D. Also mentioned in the film is the corporation Dow Chemical, which produced Agent Orange, which was widely sprayed by cargo aircraft in Vietnam and Laos. This sickened and killed thousands, and maybe hundreds of thousands of people. The music in Air America is the big tip-off that the movie is almost like a psy-op: We are led to associate the activity therein with the pop tunes from the 1970's. I really despise the fact that the producers of this movie grotesquely tried to combine the blood-thirsty, amoral pilots and others in this film with the rock and roll songs that were a symbol of resistance to the war at that time. Creedence Clearwater Revival's Run Through The Jungle being the most anti-war and ill-placed of all. Anyone who swallows what this movie is shoveling, thinking it is just "entertainment" needs to re-consider their priorities and possibly develop some spirituality. This movie could have been a potent warning, helping to prevent the C.I.A drug-running that is happening today in Afghanistan, but alas, the U.S. citizenry is not capable of such integrity to demand this.

slightlymad22 Continuing my plan to watch every Mel Gibson movie in order, I come to his second movie of 1990 Air America. Plot In A Paragraph: Air America was the CIA's private airline operating in Laos during the Vietnam War. After losing his pilot's license, Billy (Robert Downey Jr) is recruited into it, and ends up in the middle of a bunch of lunatic pilots, gun-running by his friend Gene (Gibson) and opium smuggling by his own superiors.On the back of Lethal Weapon 2 and Bird On A Wire, Gibson was on a roll, but he didn't quiet make it three in a row. I'm tempted to say that its poor gross was down to poor marketing, but I'm not sure that's entirely accurate, but the trailer and poster of a grinning Gibson and Downey Jr make it look like more of a comedy that it actually is. The subject matter is serious with a few funny scenes and clever lines. Although the subject matter is serious, the film is best as pure entertainment. I can probably sIf you've not seen it, I say give it a go. It seems to have slipped through so many peoples viewing when it was released and had pretty much been forgotten about. I can see me watching it again in the next 10 years, or if I catch it on TV. Air America grossed $31 million to end the year the 37th highest grossing movie of 1990.

AaronCapenBanner Mel Gibson & Robert Downey Jr. play two renegade pilots working for a covert CIA project in Laos during the Vietnam war. Downey is the new recruit who is still trying to adjust to the place and crazy missions he must fly. Gibson is the seasoned veteran who tries to teach him the ropes, all the while trying to remain above the increasingly out-of-control escalation of the war they are a part of, but grown cynical over the U.S. involvement, which isn't really legal, and certainly not public...Good lead stars cannot do much with such a jumbled and confusing story, that never leads anywhere, and is mostly a series of comedic vignettes that struggle to say something serious among the bizarre(yet dangerous) happenings.It just doesn't work.