Sky Riders
Sky Riders
PG | 26 March 1976 (USA)
Sky Riders Trailers

When an industrialist's wife and kids are kidnapped by terrorists in Greece, the woman's ex-husband comes to the rescue with a plan involving hang gliders.

Reviews
Nonureva Really Surprised!
BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.
Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.
Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable
vostf I am struggling to pinpoint some clever stuff in Sky Riders. The plot, as the whole movie is mediocre at best. The story itself and story editing are really awful: boring stuff happens for most of the movie before we get to real action.Coburn is good in a pretty lame role, but no actor really shines anyway since they've all been given stock characters to play without a personal touch. The gliding scenes are OK but it is really nothing close to tense action getting you to the edge of your seat. The Greek Monastery was a fine location/plot idea but it is totally wasted by the dumb script: assault is piece of cake, freeing the hostages is so easy that we have the annoying scene were the hero even has a little chat with the girl. And Day-for-Night may have been very fashionable around 1970, but the result is simply awful when supposedly tense action is shot that way for dozens of minutes.I simply stopped to hope for something interesting by that point and even stopped watching the movie ten minutes before its ending. The escape and final shootout were simply the worst action finale I can remember.
blanche-2 James Coburn, Susannah York and Robert Culp star in "Sky Riders," an action film from 1976. Culp's family is kidnapped by terrorists, and Coburn, who is the ex-husband of York and the father of her son, steps in to help. With the help of a photograph of the family sent by the terrorists, he manages to trace their location to an abandoned monastery. The only way to get there unseen is overhead, as it lays on the top of a huge rock formation. Coburn brings in experienced hang-gliders to help him.Some really nice scenery and hang-gliding sequences are the highlight of this film, along with a good performance by Coburn. The characters aren't really fleshed out, nor are the circumstances of York leaving Coburn for Culp. It's hinted at through the dialogue that Culp wanted to marry York, and in exchange for not fighting the divorce, Culp used his influence to get Coburn less prison time. The boy in the family doesn't know who Coburn is, so the marriage happened when he was very young. There was some rich character material there, but it's not played out in the script.Ordinary.
Woodyanders A group of vicious, nefarious terrorist scum kidnap the stalwart, protective wife (a plucky, spirited Susannah York) and kids of wealthy industrialist Jonas Bracken (finely played by Robert Culp). So Jonas, assisted by York's macho, take-charge mercenary ex-husband Jim McCabe (an excellently wry and laconic performance by the always cool and unflappable James Coburn), diligent police chief Charles Aznavour, and a bunch of hang-gliding enthusiasts led by the handsome, dashing John Beck, decide to raid the terrorist's remote mountainside fortress in Greece in order to get 'em back. Directed with tight, brisk, straight-down-the-line concise and unpretentious razor efficiency by Douglas Hickox, from a similarly taut, smart and sharply honed script by Jack DeWitt, Stanley Mann and Garry Michael White, further enhanced by one of Lalo Schifrin's customary lush, stirring and majestic full orchestra scores, a pleasingly prompt, unflagging pace, top-rate aerial photography, frequent outbursts of excitingly fast'n'furious violence, solid acting, glossy production values, a properly no-nonsense let's get down to brass tacks attitude, and a wild bullets and bodies a flyin' everywhere mondo destructo shoot 'em up finale, this nifty little number overall sizes up as a satisfyingly terse and to the point action/suspense thriller.
gridoon Utterly ordinary, thoroughly routine and totally forgettable adventure tale that's good only if you want to waste some time -although there are many better time-wasters around. There are no surprises and no attempts at distinguishing this film from dozens of similar films. As for the hand-gliding sequences, many of them are filmed at night and we can barely see what's happening onscreen!