HIGH-OCTANE `AIR FORCE ONE' FUELED BY SUSPENSE, STAR POWER.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

``Air Force One'' makes a virtue out of its over-the-top preposterousness. Not just a hijacked airplane thriller, not only a president-in-peril picture, sometimes an international crisis movie, this film offers barely a believable moment - except by comparison to all the summer's sci-fi sillyfests, or dopier plane crashes like ``Con Air.''

The very complaint that ``AFO'' throws too much of everything at an audience is also what keeps it a taut, viscerally suspenseful experience for nearly two no-let-up hours. Whenever the in-flight antics threaten to resemble an old ``Airport'' movie - or ``Airplane'' - we get switched back to crisis-control centers in Washington, D.C., or Moscow to get a bigger, scarier picture of how much more is riding on the outcome. It's consistently turbulent, not ``Turbulence.''

A - you'll excuse the expression - top-flight cast also helps bring conviction to the story's hokey cliches and oxygen-deficient attempts at political sophistication. Harrison Ford is, well, Jack Ryan, but this time playing a chief executive called James Marshall. He's just sent U.S. commandos into Kazakhstan to kidnap a communist-regressive dictator (Jurgen Prochnow), who is now languishing in a Russian prison, and made a big-stick/no-more-negotiating speech about it at the Kremlin.

But on the way home - don't even think of asking how - terrorists sympathetic to the tyrant take over the president's plane, Air Force One. Gary Oldman plays their firebrand leader Ivan, and he cloaks the maniac's sadism in rhetoric about capitalism turning his country into a land of prostitutes. Unlike half his staff, his wife (Wendy Crewson) and their adolescent daughter (Liesel Matthews), Marshall evades capture and spends most of the movie conducting a sometimes ingenious guerrilla war against the hijackers.

Meanwhile, back at the White House's situation room, Glenn Close's Vice President Bennett has her hands full. With a Cabinet full of power-hungry males encouraging her to act rashly and a shaky Russian counterpart who is loathe to meet the terrorist's demands, Bennett has to walk a fine line between judicious decisiveness and respect for her stressed-out - or dead, for all she knows - boss's wishes. As is often the case, Close's is the best performance in a uniformly well-acted movie.

It's a cleverly structured movie, too. Though he fails whenever he tries to fool us into thinking something serious is going on here, novice feature writer Andrew W. Marlowe has cooked up a satisfying plot stew of surprises, reversals and complications. With the help of the actors, he also pulls off the neat trick of making us worry as much about the fates of the villains as we do about their victims.

Of course, director Wolfgang Petersen deserves some credit for that as well. Petersen has made ``In the Line of Fire,'' one of the best political thrillers of the '90s, and ``Outbreak,'' one of the worst. ``AFO'' falls somewhere in between those two poles, with the excellent tone-control, timing, staging and charged relationships of the former and the ludicrous stunts and unconvincing multiple climaxes of the latter.

Hovering over all the pluses and minuses of ``Air Force One'' is the amusing/alarming idea that what America wants - that what America needs - is a president who's not afraid to break necks, if not by proxy then with his bare hands. This may be another reason why it's good the movie is so hard to believe. You think we've got trouble now, what if a guy this self-righteously belligerent really got into office?

The Facts:

The film: ``Air Force One'' (R; violence, language, children in jeopardy).

The stars: Harrison Ford, Gary Oldman, Glenn Close, Liesel Matthews, Wendy Crewson.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Written by Andrew W. Marlowe. Produced by Petersen, Gail Katz, Armyan Bernstein and Jon Shestack. Released by Columbia Pictures.

Running time: One hour, 58 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Three Stars

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Photo

PHOTO Gary Oldman's terrorist, left, faces off with Harrison Ford's tough chief executive in ``Air Force One.''