Larry Gaye: Renegade Male Flight Attendant (2015)

1 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Wingnuts

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Though it definitely has Airplane! on the brain (Julie Hagerty has a cameo and repeats some of that movie's famous dialogue), this movie lacks just about everything that made its predecessor great.

Larry Gaye (Mark Feuerstein) is the best male flight attendant in the business. Once, he longed to be a pilot, but couldn't pass flight school because of a medical condition. So now he does the best he can, and enjoys all the perks, i.e. a woman in every port. One day he discovers that the woman who came closest to tying him down, April (Jayma Mays), has a son, and he is the father.

The son, Donnie (Griffin Gluck), mistakenly thinking his father is a pilot, runs away to join him on a flight. Plus, he must compete with a robot flight attendant (Rebecca Romijn) to save his job. Then, something goes wrong with the plane's engine, and only Larry can save the day. But will he give up flying to become a family man?

Above all, Larry Gaye: Renegade Male Flight Attendant is very simply unfunny. The jokes are forced and uninspired, ranging from cheap slapstick to cheesy innuendo. The characters are too flat to be sympathetic, and it's impossible to care.

The best that can be said for this movie is that it manages to be less offensive than it might have been, avoiding deliberately disgusting or button-pushing humor. The sex jokes, though not very good, are at least not based on fear. Although, as the title might imply, it does have more than its share of dumb "gay" jokes. Somehow a huge roster of decent actors agreed to appear in small, single-scene roles, including Marcia Gay Harden, Stanley Tucci, Henry Winkler, Jason Alexander, and Molly Shannon.