I'm sure it went exactly like this movie irl, especially when Cooper chases that agent guy with a plane and they both crash at the same time. Totally believable. He could've got away easy if he didn't stop to pickup his stupid ungrateful ex-wife (although Kathryn Harrold was very hot).

I hope the real Cooper watched this movie. He probably got a good laugh out of it.

Here is a fine example of some good ol' Hollywood exploitation. They took the story of famed airplane hijacker D.B. Cooper and decided to make it into a "what if..." scenario by adapting a fictional novel called "Free Fall." Talk about a missed opportunity! Cooper (Treat Williams) lands easily in the woods of Oregon. Just as easily, insurance investigator Gruen (Robert Duvall), whose company is out the ransom money, discovers Cooper is a former charge of his from the Army and begins his pursuit. If you can distance the idea that this is about D.B. Cooper, it is a pretty entertaining chase flick in the SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT vein. I'm sure they threw the Cooper name on there to get the public interested which is a disservice to the film itself. Co-starring Kathryn Harrold, Ed Flanders, R.G. Armstrong and Paul Gleason (in a really scummy turn).

It's really hard to take this movie seriously, especially to anyone who is fascinated by the D.B. Cooper story. I think my biggest problem with the movie is that it just starts with Cooper jumping out of the plane. There is no stage of the actual highjacking and little realism of the jump itself (it happened at night time during a storm). During the actual highjacking, the bomb was not left behind by the highjacker and there was never a stewardess locked in a bathroom. The movie seems to be a parody of the events with a cheesy-hillbilly soundtrack. You almost expect a Jerry Reed/Cledus cameo or even Cheech & Chong at some point. My problem is they had the opportunity to do so much more with it and failed miserably. In recent years, the alleged highjacker was supposedly identified (see Brad Meltzer's decoded). I, for one, love the D.B. Cooper story and hope that someone will serve the story justice, but may be somewhat undeserving seeing as how the "Dan Cooper" who made the infamous jump literally flew from justice himself.