Timo Vuorensola is still a hack fraud.

After watching 97 Minutes I feel really bad for Alec Baldwin. I never really liked the guy as a person and he really became insufferable after he started playing Donald Trump in awful Saturday Night Live (a redundant phrase, I know) sketches. But he is, in my opinion, a talented guy who picked up a lot of crappy movies over the last few decades for the paycheck and I won’t fault a guy for wanting to eat. That being said, there’s very few actors I would ever wish the irredeemable indignity of being associated with Timo Vuorensola, and Baldwin is definitely better than this.

He could be doing something better written, better produced, better directed, and higher budget. Like an independent Polish fetish porn movie.

After eleven years and four movies, it’s safe to say Timo Vuorensola is a hack fraud who hit the jackpot by being around far more talented people than himself with 2012’s Iron Sky. And I really liked Iron Sky, to the point where it was a big reason I went to 2012 NY ComicCon. But Iron Sky: The Coming Race was a genuinely pathetic movie and its only legacy is that it was the biggest budget film made in Finland and also will probably always be the biggest flop, adjusted for inflation. The movie came out in 2019 and had Sarah Palin jokes for crying out loud.

With the third movie in post-production hell thanks to Iron Sky’s production studios going bankrupt and losing the copyright for the franchise due to their own incompetence, as well as defrauding backers of the second movie, Vuorensola has turned his attention to ruining other things. 2022’s Jeepers Creepers Reborn had me wondering if we could get the child molester back on board to give the film a little more respectability. And now we have 97 Minutes, a film where Alec Baldwin’s hubris causes a bunch of innocent people to be murdered. I wonder what Baldwin felt about that scene.

97 Minutes would have been much better as a parody and the moment they introduce the flight as Flight 420 I honestly thought that’s where the film was going. But it isn’t. The first few minutes are pretty jarring as we immediately start off with the plane in transit. No setup, no introduction to the characters or their motives, nothing to ease the viewer in, nothing. It’s almost like the film was produced by people who don’t know how to write a script. Looking at you, dollar store Uncle Jesse. Pavan Grover wrote this movie like a guy who has never written anything more complicated than a diner menu, which is only partly true. Grover’s last and only other writing credit was Unspeakable. In 2002.

The plane is immediately hijacked by Russian terrorists who do Russian terrorist things; shoot the marshal, scream in Russian, force the captive audience to watch Master of Disguise on the in-flight TVs. Really sick shit. Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays Alex, a double agent going by the name Steak Knife and probably the only intelligent setup and payoff this movie has, who boards the plane and is set on foiling the plot from within. Or is he? Can Alex save the day before the Russians 9/11 New York City a second time? How easy is it to get a nuke on a Qatari plane?

You can tell this movie wasn’t made in partnership with the DoD or the FAA because it makes both agencies look incompetent enough to work the set on a Timo Vuorensola film. The movie stars a bunch of nobodies who deeply overact throughout the entire movie, so I’ll just name a few standout actors. I knew I recognized Michael Sirow who plays Ashgar, you’ll remember I said he didn’t have nearly enough screen time in Wrath of Becky. I hope he gets back to more dignified films soon. There’s a few people here from Jeepers Creepers Reborn and you’ll notice I didn’t call them actors.

The reason I say 97 Minutes should have been a parody is because it is far too moronic to be a serious action thriller. The pilots at the start say with no shred of irony that they are a little over a half hour from their destination, and they have 97 minutes of fuel left. Plane had the foresight to explain the fuel shortage as the airline being cheap. The pilots don’t even acknowledge how idiotic and definitely illegal it would be for the plane to be equipped with maybe a couple of minutes of extra fuel on an international trip with apparently no reserves in case of a malfunction or leak.

Kudos to the team for using real blood effects, I will never not give points for this over crappy CGI blood splatters. Another reason this film should have leaned into the comedy aspect is the fight sequences which play like something you’d see on WWE Monday Night Brawl. And I’m completely serious when I say if they hadn’t played this movie so straight they might have had a “so bad it’s good” film on their hands. They kill a terrorist by ramming him twice with a trolley. A pilot is shot in the neck and the characters are running through the plane shouting “give me all your medicines” and the lady gives the pilot an EpiPen for his bullet wound.

It’s best you don’t think too much about the specifics, because the writer/director certainly didn’t. It’s very obvious literally no work went into the script or scene direction, or even elementary school level math to figure out if the fuel plot even made sense. The editing is awful and in some scenes splices the action in the wrong order leading to some bafflingly confusing moments. The kind of editing mistakes a toddler would probably be able to point out.

And again, I’d like to point out this is why the film should have been a parody. Because the glaring mistakes and shoddy writing wouldn’t be a fault, they’d be a feature. It’s supposed to be stupid and nonsensical, we’re mocking the idea of thrillers and their gobbledygook jargon, ridiculous plot twists, and the double and triple and quadruple agents.

Timo has the natural idiocy to get 80% of the way to parody without the talent or insight to push it the last 20%, and that’s why all of his films after Iron Sky have sucked. I did bump the grade up a half letter because nobody actually died on set.

Rating: F-