MOVIE REVIEW : Snipes Out to Land Sky-Divers in ‘Zone’

The best thing about “Drop Zone” are the stunt sky-divers who dive-bomb through the air at speeds of 200 m.p.h. or float together in formation. These jumpers are juiced by pure adrenaline and they juice the audience too.

Director John Badham is a techno-whiz at this sort of stuff, and he’s smart enough to keep the stunt divers at the center of the action. And a good thing too: The script, by Peter Barsocchini and John Bishop, is so preposterously contrived and tone-deaf that any attempt to play it straight would be laughed off the screen. It’s no use picking away at “Drop Zone”--the filmmakers have done that for you.

Wesley Snipes plays Pete Nessip, a U.S. marshal tracking down a team of stunt sky-divers who have cooked up a plan to swoop down on the Drug Enforcement Agency headquarters in Washington during the Fourth of July celebrations and abscond with their entire computerized roster of undercover drug agents. The team’s asking price for the DEA list--$2 million a month. (No doubt a bargain compared to this film’s budget.)

Pete first gets wind of these jumpers when he and his brother Terry (Malcolm-Jamal Warner) are transporting a convicted computer whiz (Michael Jeter, in his best flibbertigibberty mode) to a federal prison on a commercial 747. Posing as terrorists, the jumpers, led by the truly bad Ty Moncrief (Gary Busey), yank the master hacker off the plane, killing Terry in the process. Later Pete goes to another sky-diver--the good-bad girl parolee Jessie (Yancy Butler)--for help in cracking the case. Whereupon Ty offs her highflying boyfriend. So their motives for revenge are personal .

The ground-level action is mostly filler for the highflying jamborees. Parachute-equipped but untutored, Pete learns how to sky-dive after Jessie throws him horrified out of a plane. It’s not exactly Meet Cute time. When he joins Jessie’s team of avengers, his participation is played mostly for comic relief.

Snipes is very funny at acting scared in the sky. His performance starts out tough-edged but he seems to have decided early on that “Drop Zone” didn’t really need an actor. He’s more like a stunt double comic, yet his charisma is so strong that he holds the movie together whenever it isn’t airborne--quite an achievement.

There are a few good scenes involving the wiggy camaraderie of jumpers (Grace Zabriskie and Corin Nemec stand out) and Busey once again demonstrates that he’s the best heavy in the business. But you could skip everything in “Drop Zone” except, perhaps, for the aerial wingdings and still live a full and complete life. (It would be different, of course, if the film had included the Flying Elvises.)

A side issue: Pete, who is black, and Jessie, who is white, clearly have a budding attraction--plus they save each other’s lives. So why doesn’t the film allow them a single kiss? This is the same question a lot of us asked in the Denzel Washington-Julia Roberts starrer “Pelican Brief,” which was also kissless. Now that a new generation of black superstars like Snipes and Washington are figuring in interracial romantic scenarios, is it too much to ask that these performers be allowed to be romantic?

* MPAA rating: R, for strong language and violence. Times guidelines: It includes scenes of people being sucked out of planes and a man’s finger being torn off.

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‘Drop Zone’

Wesley Snipes: Pete Nessip Gary Busey: Ty Moncrief Michael Jeter: Earl Leedy Yancy Butler: Jessie Crossman A Paramount Pictures presentation. Director John Badham. Producers D.J. Caruso, Wallis Nicita, Lauren Lloyd. Screenplay by Peter Barsocchini and John Bishop. Cinematographer Roy H. Wagner. Editor Frank Morriss. Costumes Mary Vogt. Music Hans Zimmer. Production design Joe Alves. Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes.

* In general release .