THE alleged action-comedy Air America (Pearl, 10.00pm) has everything an action-comedy should have except the action and the comedy. Mel Gibson wise-cracks and swaggers his way through 112 minutes as only Mel Gibson can. He was better in Hamlet, but then Hamlet had a plot and a script.
It is 1969 and the US is up to its eyeballs in the Vietnam War. Across the border in Laos an organisation known as Air America is airlifting food and other supplies to Laotian villagers and to indigenous forces battling the communists.
So far so good. But one of the Air America pilots is Gene Ryack (Gibson), and it is here that Air America begins to go terribly wrong. Gibson's smart-aleck persona is too much to bear. In an early flying scene with co-star Robert Downey Jr (who played Charlie Chaplin in Sir Richard Attenborough's Chaplin) he gets the battered aircraft down safely but crash-lands all the one-liners.
Downey plays Billy Covington, a young, rebellious, but skilled helicopter pilot who gets the sack as a radio station's ''eye in the sky'' - and loses his licence - after a stand-off with a belligerent trucker on a congested freeway.
A mysterious recruiter offers Billy a job with Air America. When he arrives in Laos Gibson is assigned to take him on an orientation flight. They dislike each other, they like each other, then they find they are the fall guys in an international conspiracy that threatens the lives of thousands.
Watch it if you must - heaven knows there is little else worthy of your attention this evening, unless you like tennis - but do not expect to be thrilled and do not expect to laugh. Mel Gibson, as he proved in Hamlet, can do so much better, and so can Robert Downey Jnr, as he proved in Chaplin.
