Flight Plan
Sure, for a good hour this film was little more than Jodie Foster running up and down the aisles of an airplane screaming hysterically for her missing child, but fuck me if I wasn't halfway intrigued.
I love a great thriller, and I like stories where you are genuinely in the dark about what exactly is going on, there's no red herrings, no usual suspects you are crossing off one by one. Stories where a character has just been suddenly plunged into a terrifying and disorientating situation, and has to figure their way out of it, as we the audience go along for the ride. The problem with stories like this, in both books and film, is that 99% of the time when they have to resolve and explain things, they've got sweet fuck all. It's piss-easy to come up with a bewildering concept, like a child disappearing mid-air-flight, but it seems writers often trap themselves with their premise, and leave themselves nowhere to go…kind of like being in an airplane mid-flight.
About an hour into Flight Plan , when the ‘twist' is revealed, this went from mildly curious to absolute shit. The bad guy is revealed and hilariously runs through his entire evil plan with his accomplice for the cameras, explaining everything in a rapid burst during which the writers obviously were desperately trying to cover the gaping plot holes lining the run-way so the film could land. Hey – if you can totally suspend your disbelief and don't mind being treated like a fucking moron by a film so dumb it makes Martin Lawrence's oeuvre almost seem palatable, then you might actually be able to finish this without wrestling with the remote control. Now I loathe geeks who pick apart the fabric of a film (“A car couldn't really fly using that formula”, “C'mon, everyone knows elves actually have a class-5 level intelligence!”, “Why would aliens who are vulnerable to water try to take over Earth?”) but this film crosses a line in trying to defy all plausibility. Make that crosses many lines, many times.
I love Jodi Foster, truly I do, which makes me sad that she has basically just succumbed to Panic Room 2: Panic Air and has resigned to these protective mother roles that seem to be the only thing she can get/wants to do. Poor Sean Bean gets even worse off as the captain of the plane whose only real dialogue is repeatedly reminding everyone that he is, in fact, the captain, and as the captain the passengers are his responsibility, being the captain and all.
Then there's the obligatory set-on-an-airplane-in-a-post-9/11-world thing. There's a touching moment right at the end of the film where the Arab man she very publicly accused of taking her daughter (because, y'know, he was an Arab and they all look dodgy don't they?) helps her with her bag, as if to say “Hey lady, I know you're racist and that all Arabs get a bad rap these days by people like you, but you're alright!” To me that's a powerful moment, a moment that seems to be saying: If only more Arabs were helping people with their luggage and not all wanting to blow us up, then the world would be a much better place.