This one could have been called Unlawful Entry 2: The Unfriendly Skies. As a so-called action thriller, Turbulence is about as exciting as a preflight instructional and takes longer to get airborne than an FAA investigation.

Ray Liotta plays his familiar psycho -- a serial killer who's pissed off that the law nailed him by planting evidence. Under guard and in shackles, he's put on a sparsely filled flight from New York to LA, where he'll await execution. Of course, the airliner hits turbulence and in the mayhem Liotta and another death-row freak kill the federal marshals and take over the plane. Liotta, who has a thing for lonely women, spends most of the transcontinental journey stalking Lauren Holly's stewardess (the best line of the film involves the profession's politically correct phraseology) as the pilot-less plane sails through the mother of all storms.

Holly does what she can as the imperiled heroine, and her attempts to land the 747 are somewhat interesting from a technical perspective, but it's the autopilot with more lives than a cat that steals the show. In light of the terrors that abound in today's skies, Turbulence proves to be an unimaginative vehicle that should never have been cleared for take-off.