Just call "Nowhere to Land" "Airport 2000." As the "Airport" film series' increasing propensity for the ludicrous helped spell the end of the disaster flick, "Nowhere to Land's" relative indifference to rendering the genre staple likewise demonstrates why it's just as well those films aren't made anymore.
     Here, the disaster - and a puny one it is, too; it's as if the filmmakers are squeamish about killing people, which won't get them far in this business - is attributed to that old stand-by, the unhinged jilted husband with easy access to the military's most dangerous toxic gases. He rigs a bombs in a 747 heading from Sydney, Australia (where the film was shot), to Los Angeles, then informs the airline when the plane is hours from dry land and there's little anyone can do.
     Screenwriter Matt Dorff and director Armand Mastroianni rather listlessly set up the dramatis personae for their little yarn: The ruggedly handsome, heroic pilot (Jack Wagner), his spunky co-pilot (Christine Elise), the basketball-loving munitions expert (Ernie Hudson), the useful yet expendable old guy (James B. Sikking) and sundry couples and whiny passengers, who all virtually drop out of sight as soon as the "drama" kicks in.
     "Nowhere to Land" offers few true pleasures. There's the vaguely amusing spectacle of Aussie actors struggling with American accents. There are luxuriant visuals of an airplane with - get this - comfortably wide aisles (you could get a marching band down these aisles!). And there are a few ostensibly tense moments as the slowest poison gas in the history of filmed entertainment seeps wheezingly through the plane during a comically staged evacuation. This gas is so slow that once the survivor escape, there's no effort to seal the plane even though there's allegedly enough to wipe out everyone from LAX to Oakland. But in movies like this, not only is there nowhere to land, there's no time to think.