Rough Air: Danger on Flight 534 - Tray tables up?

If you’re in the mood for a mid-altitude crisis that checks every air disaster box without ever pushing the emergency slide of insanity, Rough Air: Danger on Flight 534 is the in-flight entertainment you never asked for—but might not mind watching with a bag of stale pretzels. This 2001 made-for-TV thriller stars Eric Roberts, who delivers one of the most aggressively disinterested performances in a movie about a plummeting death tube ever recorded. And yet, somehow, the film still finds a way to stay airborne as an enjoyable slice of light turbulence TV cheese.

The plot is your standard disaster blueprint: a disgraced pilot (Roberts) is pulled out of aviation exile to take over a flight after the captain suffers a sudden heart attack mid-flight. Cue the typical cabin drama: nervous passengers, a weepy stewardess, shaky controls, a storm system on the radar, and the always-welcome fuel crisis. But instead of going full barrel roll into each disaster trope, the film kind of… brushes up against them. It starts to nosedive into clichés and then levels off just before impact, leaving you wondering if it’s building to something bigger. (Spoiler: it’s not.)

What really sells the surreal mediocrity of the movie is Eric Roberts, who is not so much phoning it in as texting it in from a burner phone. His emotional range here is somewhere between “waiting at the DMV” and “mildly annoyed a vending machine ate his dollar.” The stakes may be life or death, but Roberts plays it like he’s watching a curling match and doesn’t know the rules. He’s not wooden. He’s laminated indifference.

Still, there’s something kind of comforting about the movie’s half-hearted commitment to disaster movie glory. It never crashes and burns, nor does it soar. It just floats in the airspace of “pretty okay.” If you’re a fan of “Fly Hard” flicks—where troubled pilots, stormy skies, and panicked passengers do their dance—this is a breezy 86-minute ride. Just don’t expect to remember anything about it once you’ve deplaned.