Searching for the Ideal 4th of July Movie? Look No Further Than ‘Drop Zone'

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3 days ago

Reader, you have been lied to! Film history is littered with unfairly maligned classics, whether critics were too eager to review the making of rather than the finished product, or they suffered from underwhelming ad campaigns or general disinterest. Let's revise our takes on some of these films from wrongheaded to the correct opinion.
When director John Badham's skydiving thriller 'Drop Zone' was released by Paramount Pictures in December 1994, the general perception was that it was a ridiculous and disposable programmer. It did OK at the box office (opening at number three behind Barry Levinson's hot-button drama 'Disclosure' and the Tim Allen family hit 'The Santa Clause'), but critics had their knives out for the movie's allegedly indefensible plot holes, and the movie was largely forgotten a few weeks after it opened.
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'Drop Zone,' with its story of a US Marshal (Wesley Snipes) pursuing a gang of skydiving hackers out to infiltrate the DEA computer system on the 4th of July, is ridiculous, but it's not disposable — it's actually one of the great last gasps of practical action filmmaking at the tail end of the form's greatest era. And it's one of the last great movies by Badham, a director who never really got the credit he deserved due to his tendency to gravitate toward the kind of escapist pulp that ages well but is rarely appreciated by the critical intelligentsia in its time.
'Drop Zone' began life as a story by professional skydivers Guy Manos and Tony Griffin — talk show host Merv's son — and got turned into a workable screenplay by Peter Barsocchini, a producer for Tony's dad who would go on to write Disney's 'High School Musical' movies. Action scribe John Bishop ('The Package') was also credited, and rumor has it that a lot of writers of the moment took uncredited passes at the script. In spite of all the cooks in the kitchen, however, 'Drop Zone' has a smooth, classic clarity, and it's perfectly paced to feel swift but never rushed — it's an impeccably calibrated entertainment machine.
The movie starts off with a fantastic Badham set piece, in which Snipes and his ill-fated brother and partner (Malcolm Jamal-Warner) transport a prisoner (Michael Jeter) on a plane that's hijacked by psychotic ex-DEA agent Gary Busey and his team of renegade skydivers. Busey and his partners pretend to be terrorists, blow a hole in the plane, and plummet to the earth with Jeter while leaving behind evidence that he's been killed — evidence that placates all the authorities back on the ground, but which Snipes refuses to accept. Determined to avenge his brother, who is killed during the incident, Snipes goes rogue and heads off in pursuit of the evil skyjackers.
The hijacking sequence is a clinic in the kind of complex yet straightforward action filmmaking at which Badham excels; it's several minutes of non-stop chaos, yet the director keeps us completely acclimated to the space so that we always know exactly what's happening, where, why, and to whom. The set piece is exhilarating, not exhausting, and the heightened absurdity of it all is part of the fun. By any literal standard the criminals' plan is completely insane, but the insanity is the point; as critic Bilge Ebiri wrote in the liner notes for the Blu-ray decades after the film's release, 'Drop Zone' isn't about suspension of disbelief — it's an embrace and an exaltation of disbelief.
What gives the movie its kick is the juxtaposition of a plot in which the characters are governed more by the laws of Looney Tunes cartoons than the known universe and action set pieces more vivid and realistic than anything of their type ever put on screen. Snipes determines that to catch Busey and his team he's going to have to learn how to skydive himself, and he puts together his own makeshift ensemble of mavericks to pursue the bad guys. As most critics at the time of the movie's release pointed out, it's a somewhat bizarre and nonsensical plan, but the logic (or lack thereof) in the plotting is not the point; the point is the generous supply of jaw-dropping skydiving sequences that the plot facilitates.
While practical effects and breathtaking stunt work are certainly still with us in the summer of 'Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,' the sheer abundance of skydiving stunts in 'Drop Zone,' and the way they're spread across the ensemble, remains stunning over 30 years later. Part of what's impressive is the casual quality with which Badham tosses them off; in a 'Mission: Impossible' movie every stunt is an event, and every set piece a showcase for star Tom Cruise's physical mastery, but Badham doesn't linger on his stunts or draw attention to the difficulty of their execution. He simply presents them and moves on, with the confidence of a director who knows there's plenty more where that came from.
By the time Badham made 'Drop Zone' he was nearing the end of his feature film career ('Nick of Time' would be the only theatrical release to follow before he returned to where he began, directing episodic TV), and the movie synthesizes all of his strengths and presents them in both their most concentrated form and at their largest scale. In movies like 'Blue Thunder,' 'Stakeout,' 'The Hard Way,' and 'Point of No Return' Badham had proven himself to be a deft stager of cinematic rollercoaster rides (literally, in the case of 'Bird on a Wire'), and 'Drop Zone' distills his skills down to their essence. It's pure action, bodies moving through space and time with just enough emotion and, for lack of a better word, philosophy to give the action weight.
That weight is largely the result of Badham's gift for depicting fringe subcultures with a rich sense of anthropological detail — it's the closest his work comes to an auteurist stamp, and the one thing that links movies as disparate as his early realist dramas 'The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings' and 'Saturday Night Fever' with later action and sports movies like 'WarGames' and 'American Flyers.' A movie like 'Saturday Night Fever' is all anthropological study, as Badham burrows into the daily grind and nightly rituals of disco-obsessed Brooklynite Tony Manero (John Travolta). In 'Drop Zone,' Badham manages to dive just as deeply into the subculture he's depicting (in this case, that of skydiving thrill-seekers) without shortchanging any of the genre demands his material places on him — the movie never really slows down, yet somehow finds time for dozens of fascinatingly specific revelations about its characters and the ways they live and work.
The sense of documentary reality undoubtedly comes largely from Manos and Griffin's personal experience, as well as from Badham's insistence on fully realizing the specific details on screen. The fun thing about 'Drop Zone' is the way the accuracy of the lifestyle coexists alongside the outrageous premise; when Busey and his team use a 4th of July skydiving exhibition as cover to drop into Washington's DEA headquarters, wearing lit-up suits that make them look like something out of 'Tron,' it couldn't possibly be more implausible, yet in the universe that Badham has established it's both convincing and desirable — we believe it because Badham has made us want to believe it in his creation of such a rich environment in which the lunacy can occur.
The visual generosity of 'Drop Zone,' in which the striking images rarely repeat themselves and are hurled at the viewer in abundance, is partly thanks to second unit director D.J. Caruso, who would go on to the top job on films like 'The Salton Sea' and 'Disturbia' but established his action bonafides here by going on well over a hundred helicopter rides to collect skydiving material. This speaks to another one of Badham's strengths, his ability to assemble a top-notch team — in addition to Caruso, key participants in 'Drop Zone' include composer Hans Zimmer, whose combination of orchestral and electronic music works like gangbusters, and director of photography Roy Wagner, whose elegant night exteriors provide some of the most lyrical and beautiful action this side of 'Heat.'
That in its moment 'Drop Zone' was seen as run of the mill speaks as much to the different age in studio filmmaking as it does to any perceived failures on the movie's part; as was so often the case in the 1990s, we took 'Drop Zone' for granted because we never thought there would be a shortage of smart, skillfully made escapist entertainments coming from the studios on a regular basis. As of this writing Paramount has released a grand total of two movies theatrically in 2025 — 'Novocaine' and 'Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.' In the year that 'Drop Zone' came out the studio released 16, and the range included everything from awards favorite 'Forrest Gump' and the Tom Clancy blockbuster 'Clear and Present Danger' to auteurist oddities like William Friedkin's 'Blue Chips' and Barry Levinson's 'Jimmy Hollywood.' Hollywood, we hardly knew ye.
Thankfully, one of the unexpected upshots of the studios losing more and more interest in physical media is that boutique DVD and Blu-ray labels have begun to create a new canon, rescuing gems like 'Drop Zone' from obscurity and treating them with the respect they always deserved. Earlier this year Vinegar Syndrome released exquisite special editions of 'Virtuosity' and several other films from the Paramount catalog, and now the specialty label Cinématographe has put out 'Drop Zone' in a 4K UHD/Blu-ray combo package with hours of special features and a booklet containing some welcome critical reappraisals (including Ebiri's). It's essential viewing, and hopefully the first step toward a long overdue reevaluation and reconsideration for 'Drop Zone' and Badham.
The 'Drop Zone' special edition 4K UHD release is now available from Cinématographe.
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