It stars Kurt Russell, Steven Seagal, Halle Berry, John Leguizamo, Oliver Platt, Joe Morton, David Suchet and B.D.

In May 1995, Lieutenant Colonel Austin Travis leads an unsuccessful Special Forces black ops raid on a Chechen mafia safe house in Trieste, Italy, to recover a stolen Soviet nerve agent, DZ-5.

Three months later, Oceanic Airlines Flight 343, a Boeing 747-200, leaves Athens bound for Washington, D.C., with more than 400 passengers aboard including Nagi Hassan, lieutenant of the imprisoned terrorist leader El Sayed Jaffa.

Dr. David Grant, the U.S. Army intelligence consultant behind the botched raid, is summoned to a meeting at the Pentagon to plan an operation to retake the plane.

The team locates the bomb and Cappy, despite his injuries, guides Cahill in disarming it until they discover its arming device has an additional, remote-controlled trigger.

Baker uses Morse code via the 747's taillights to signal the fighters that the team made it aboard, requesting an extra ten minutes to neutralize the bomb and retake the 747, despite already crossing into U.S. airspace.

Jean spots a man with an electronic device and informs Grant, who enters the passenger cabin to take the suspected individual by surprise, only to find he is merely a diamond thief.

Now flying north over Maryland, Grant recognizes the area surrounding his training airfield, Frederick Field, and opts to attempt to land the 747 there.

Steven Seagal says that he was enticed to accept the unusual role of Austin Travis by a hefty salary, which amounted to around a million dollars per day spent on the shoot.

[6] An ex-Kuwait Airways 747-269BM belonging to Kalitta Air (registration N707CK) was featured in most of the in-flight shots,[citation needed] while a Corsair 747-121 (externally identical to the 747-200) formerly owned by Pan Am was used for closeups of the aircraft in the aftermath of the crash landing at the end.

The site's consensus states: "Executive Decision adheres entertainingly to classic action thriller formula, proving a genre outing doesn't need to win points for originality to be solidly effective.

"[12] Roger Ebert rated it 3 out of 4 stars, calling it "a gloriously goofy mess of a movie" with several plot holes (e.g. smuggling a toxin into the country would likely be easier and just as effective as hijacking).

Steven Seagal earned a Razzie Award nomination for Worst Supporting Actor for his performance in the film but lost to Marlon Brando for The Island of Dr.