High Life

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

SKY RIDERS

Directed by DOUGLAS HICKOX Screenplay by JACK DEWITT, STANLEY MANN and GARRY MICHAEL WHITE

It is hard to comprehend why it required three writers to do this screenplay, when any reasonably bright nine-year-old could have managed it. The story is the stuff of convention: get some innocents (a mother and two children) captured by some baddies (in this case lunatic political terrorists) and sequestered where they are rescue-proof by conventional means (a deserted monastery on top of an isolated peak). The whole idea is to make an improbable --and cinematically novel--rescue gimmick a logical necessity, and in this the scriveners succeed.

How to snatch Mom (Susannah York) and the kids from their closely guarded aerie? By hang glider, of course. Happily, a barnstorming group of gliding fools is playing just down the beach (Greece is full of such folks in the summertime), and James Coburn is on hand to put two and two together and lead the night raid on the monastery.

Many a tricky wind current swirls about the place and, full moon or no, you really don't want to be swooping around mountainous country in those fragile contraptions. Still, Coburn is a brave fellow, a smuggler by trade, and strongly motivated--the mother having once been his wife and the eldest child being his. He must take what turns out to be a crash course in handling the gliders, and that is funny.

Once he and his new friends launch themselves on their mission proper, it turns out to be well staged and photographed, the beauty of the gliders aloft or the suspenseful silence of their descent on the wicked ones is impossible to deny. The concluding shootout, in which the police and the army bumble up just in time to help, is also nicely handled, bloodshed and death being kept to a minimum instead of being dwelt upon in the modish manner.

You can safely take the kids to Sky Riders and have a nice, old-fashioned Saturday matinee kind of time yourself. The whole thing is nothing much, but since it is unpretentiously so, it ends up sort of special.

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