Vitals

Wesley Snipes as John Cutter, airline security chief and ex-Secret Service agent

In flight from Miami to Los Angeles, Spring 1992

Film: Passenger 57
Release Date: November 6, 1992
Director: Kevin Hooks
Costume Designer: Brad R. Loman

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, sometimes there’s nothing more necessary than to sit back and turn off your brain to watch a pleasantly absurd ’90s action movie. Luckily for us, Kevin Hooks directed the 1992 action thriller Passenger 57—its title literally inspired after writer Stewart Raffill spied a bottle of Heinz ketchup.

Wesley Snipes stars as John Cutter, a former* Secret Service agent whose stalwart reputation has followed him into his latest career as an airline security consultant, training flight attendants like Marti Slayton (Alex Datcher) how to handle hijacking scenarios. After his pal Sly Delvecchio (Tom Sizemore) helps Cutter secure an executive position as the vice president of security for the fictional Atlantic International Airlines, Cutter boards Atlantic Flight 163… the same flight on which FBI agents are escorting the dangerous international criminal Charles Rane (Bruce Payne)—who is not insane—back to California to face trial.

With his history of commercial airline bombings that makes us—and Delvecchio—wonder why the feds would choose this particular method of transportation, “the Rane of terror” has more explosive ideas for securing his freedom, which becomes an unfortunate situation for his fellow passengers—all except passenger #57, who happens to be the nation’s foremost expert in combating air terrorism.

“That’s John Cutter, he’s a security specialist for the airlines,” Marti explains to her English colleague, Sabrina Ritchie (Elizabeth Hurley), who responds “Security? I feel safe already.” Meanwhile, Cutter is casually reading The Art of War during takeoff, trying to get his mind off of his dislike for flying. Having antagonized Marti during his earlier courses, the flight attendant gets her revenge by seating him next to the elderly Mrs. Edwards (Duchess Tomasello), who clearly mistakes him for Arsenio Hall. Just as Mrs. Edwards is ranting about how much she loved how he told off Madonna (“who is she to tell you how to wear your hair?!”), Cutter escapes to the bathroom—just as Sabrina helps Rane make his deadly first moves.

After Rane’s dangerous team of hijackers have already taken at least five lives, Cutter escapes with Marti down into the plane’s central control area where he hopes to earn her trust in his risky methods to stop Rane, dumping the plane’s fuel to force a landing at the small Lake Lucille Airport in Louisiana (though actually filmed outside Snipes’ hometown of Orlando, Florida.)

Marti: Tell me you’re good at this.
Cutter: I’m the best.

Passenger 57 was released on November 6, 1992, which—if the passport scan in the opening credits is to be believed—is also our villain Charles Rane’s in-universe 34th birthday. Despite some praise for Snipes and Rane’s performances, reviews were middling but not enough to stop the film from recouping its $15 million budget to be a considerable box-office success and launching Snipes’ action career.

*My apologies. Cutter clarifies early on that he’s “not a former anything”.

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What’d He Wear?

John Cutter layers for comfort when boarding Atlantic Flight 163, buttoning a bright royal-blue soft silky microfiber sports shirt over a lightweight black turtleneck worn as his base layer. The blue over-shirt has a roomy fit characteristic of 1990s fashions, styled like classic mid-century sportswear with its loop collar and pair of flapped chest pockets without button closure. The plain front fastens with flat white pearl-like two-hole buttons, matching the single buttons closing each squared cuff.

Once the hijacking transforms Cutter from merely passenger #57 into bona fide action hero, he absolutely needs a cool jacket. When he and Marti are crossing through the baggage hold after cutting the plane’s fuel supply, he spots a wicked weathered biker jacket and—like me in a thrift stop—immediately halts to add it to his collection. (Of course, the jacket also serves the practical purpose of giving him added protection as he falls from the Lockheed L-1011 onto the Louisiana runway.)

The jacket’s distinctive braided leather epaulets identify it as the Vintage by M. Julian brand: a mid-market label often sold through Wilsons Leather stores during the 1980s and ’90s. Made from a tough brown cowhide pre-aged to a rugged patina, the piece adds several fashion-forward elements to the classic Schott Perfecto-style motorcycle jacket design. It has the requisite waist-length cut with an asymmetrical front zip, zip-back cuffs, and wide shoulders with deep pleats behind them to allow a wide range of movement—helpful whether riding a chopper or leaping onto a jumbo jet’s landing gear.

Though both front panels have slanted zip-up chest pockets and welted hand pockets, the jacket was designed with a quirky asymmetry that boxes the left chest pocket into a swelled patch-like enclosure and accents the right chest pocket’s zip pull with a loop of braided leather that matches the shoulder epaulets. A half-belt hangs down from the front (but can also be fastened around the back), pulled through a loop on each side and closing through a squared single-prong roller buckle; the sides of this belt are sewn against triangular vent patches on each side which are laced up through three sets of eyelets.

Cutter tucks his shirts into light-blue denim jeans with the full cut that would qualify them to modern viewers as “Dad Jeans”, held up with a black leather belt that closes through a polished silver-toned single-prong squared buckle. These jeans follow the typical design with two deeply curved front pockets, a smaller watch/coin pocket set into the right-front pocket, and two patch pockets over the seat. The pockets feature a decorative double stitch pattern, with a shallow arcuate dipping below a horizontal stitch that it runs parallel to. A white-lettered red tag sewn along the outer seam of the back-left pocket identifies these as BIG STAR jeans, a brand founded in Switzerland in 1979 that has been 100% Polish-owned since 2007.

Cutter wears plain black suede plain-toe derby shoes and black wide-ribbed cotton lisle socks.

Worn most prominently in the airport before he tucks them into his left shirt pocket, Cutter’s narrow wire-rimmed sunglasses reflect the minimalist aesthetic that was popular through the 1990s and Y2K era. A slim, dark bronze-finished metal frame encircles the oval lenses, curving back to slender temples with tortoise-padded tips behind his ears.

Cutter always wears a pair of gold rings: the thick wedding band on his left hand to signify his marriage to the late Lisa (Elena Ayala) and a small gold hoop earring in his left ear.

Like fellow action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger through the ’80s, Wesley Snipes’ Cutter embraces the analog-digital hybrid watch with the brushed stainless Armitron strapped to his left wrist on a matching three-piece semi-circular link bracelet. Snipes likely wears the quartz-powered Armitron ref. 20/2105, rated up to 165 feet of water resistance.

With three shallow pushers in addition to the crown at 3 o’clock, this watch has a matching rotating bezel featuring stepped squares at each 10-minute interval, a black dial split into a single LCD window across the bottom for calendar and date functions and a full analog dial at the top with large luminous squares flanked by the white-printed Arabic numerals 1 to 12 on the inner track and non-numeric minute indices along the outer track.

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The Guns

After Cutter incapacitates the curly-locked hijacker with a swirly, he takes the man’s Glock 19 for himself. Two years earlier in another air-security action flick, Die Hard 2 had denigrated Glocks as “a porcelain gun from Germany [that] doesn’t show up on airport X-ray machines and costs more than you earn in a month.”

Despite his many virtues, John McClane had grossly misrepresented these Austrian (not German) pistols, which are built with polymer (not plastic) frames that reduce their weight but still include plenty of steel in their construction… and undeniably show up on airport X-ray machines. Fortunately, Passenger 57 doesn’t perpetuate this cinematic fiction and instead portrays the Glock among other steel-framed pistols—like Rane’s Beretta 92FS and Sabrina’s SIG-Sauer P226—that are loaded aboard via a deadly breakdown in galley security.

The full-size Glock 17 was the first Glock pistol to be produced, followed six years later by the downscaled Glock 19 that—despite dozens of additional models in varying size and caliber configurations—remains a global law-enforcement standard for its reliability, capacity, modular maintenance, and ease of use. Like its predecessor, the Glock 19 is chambered for 9x19mm Parabellum ammunition.

During the tarmac gunfight at Lake Lucille Airport in Louisiana, FBI agent Dwight Henderson (Robert Hooks) takes a gunshot to the arm while exchanging fire with the terrorist Vincent (Marc Macaulay). Following this, he presumably hands off his wooden-gripped Taurus PT92 to Cutter, who fires it into Vincent until the slide locks back, empty.

The PT92 was Brazilian firearms manufacturer Forjas Taurus S.A.’s answer to the increasingly popular Beretta 92 pistol series. Taking advantage of Beretta’s expired design patents from the 1970s, Taurus essentially copied the Beretta 92 with its characteristic open-slide design that exposes much of the barrel, with the PT92’s primary difference relocating the thumb safety from the slide to the frame to allow cocked-and-locked carry.

While the Beretta 92F and 92FS gradually became the United States’ military and government’s service pistol of choice after the mid-1980s, the Taurus never saw this degree of federal adoption, so Henderson’s Taurus PT92 is likely meant to stand in for the Beretta.

When Cutter has the “ham-hock-and-country-biscuit-eatin'” sheriff Leonard Biggs (Ernie Lively) position his speeding squad car under the plane so Cutter can slither up the landing gear, he demands a gun before he leaves. Biggs reluctantly pulls his stainless steel Taurus Model 689 from his duty holster and hands it over with a warning: “I want this back in good condition, it belongs to my wife!” only for the revolver to almost immediately tumble out of Cutter’s waistband and onto the tarmac while he clings to the departing Lockheed’s landing gear.

Also made by the Brazilian firm Taurus, the Model 689 was introduced in the late 1980s and produced for a decade to follow. As its name suggests, many design details echo the large-framed Smith & Wesson Model 686 developed earlier that decade, though the vented barrel rib resembles the Colt Python. Like the Model 686 and Python, the Taurus Model 689 was chambered for .357 Magnum with a standard double/single-action trigger and six-round cylinder.

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What to Imbibe

All he wants is an aspirin.

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How to Get the Look

Wesley Snipes exemplifies early ’90s action-hero cool in his found leather jacket, full but flattering sports shirt, dad jeans, and turtleneck, and analog-digital watch that survives his plane-hopping adventures in Passenger 57.

• Weathered brown cowhide fashion-forward biker jacket with asymmetrical front zip, braided leather shoulder epaulets, zip-back sleeves, two zip-up chest pockets, two welted hand pockets, half-belted front, triple-laced side vents, and deep rear shoulder pleats
  • Vintage by M. Julian
• Royal-blue silky microfiber sports shirt with loop collar, plain button-up front, two flapped chest pockets, and 1-button squared cuffs
• Black lightweight turtleneck
• Light-blue denim jeans with belt loops, curved front pockets, right-side coin/watch pocket, and patch back pockets
  • BIG STAR
• Black smooth leather belt with polished silver-toned single-prong squared buckle
• Black suede plain-toe derby shoes
• Black wide-ribbed cotton lisle socks
• Gold hoop earring
• Bronze wire-framed narrow oval sunglasses
• Gold wedding band
• Brushed stainless steel wristwatch with black analog/digital dial and steel semi-circular three-piece link bracelet
  • Armitron ref. 20/2105

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Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

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The Quote

I’m not all that comfortable on planes, you know… whenever anything moves faster than I can walk, I’d just as soon be behind the wheel.

Ever play roulette? Well, let me give you a word of advice: always bet on Black!