Top 3 films featuring airports

To coincide with our guide to filming at airports, here are our top three films with an airport setting.
 
What do you think of our favourites? Let us know what you think via our Facebook page.
 
 
1 – Airplane!

This 1980 gag-fest disaster spoof launched Leslie Nielsen (known at the time for serious roles) as a comedy actor; came up with the classic line ‘Don’t call me Shirley’, and has been featured in numerous film countdown lists, coming out on top in Empire’s Top 50 Comedies Ever poll.

After Airplane! Nielsen went on to team up once again with the film’s writers and directors, Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker for the Police Squad! TV series, which later was reworked for the big screen as The Naked Gun and its two sequels.

Airplane! spawned many cheap imitations but nothing has equalled it since – nor topped the amount of great one-liners and puns littered throughout the film. In 2012, Charlie Brooker paid homage to the film in Channel 4's A Touch of Cloth, spoofing the detective genre.


2 – Die Hard 2: Die Harder

Following Bruce Willis’ first outing as the barefooted, vest wearing detective in Die Hard, it was always going to be difficult to better this film by way of a sequel. Director Renny Harlin did a good enough job – although hardly a classic by any means, it still holds up as a fun action romp.

Waiting for his wife to land at a Washington airport on Christmas Eve, John McClane is, once again, in the wrong place at the wrong time. After discovering terrorists are planning some wrongdoing, the maverick cop goes on a rampage – beating the crap out of the bad guys; speeding on a snowmobile and being catapulted out of a plane ejector seat.


3 – Casablanca

The final scene from this 1942 masterpiece has gone down in cinema history as one of the most memorable scenes on celluloid.

Bidding farewell to Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), Rick (Humphrey Bogart) delivers one of the most famous lines in cinema: ‘Here’s looking at you kid’. Cinema trickery is at its best here, with the filmmakers using dwarf extras and a proportionate cardboard plane, as the sound stage was too small for the real one.


It’s worth noting that someone in our office did put forward The Terminal (they shall remain nameless), however, taking into account Tom Hanks’ dire attempt at a ‘European’ accent, we had to omit the film from any consideration. Bad Tom!