Review of Flight (2012) by Andrew W — 14 Dec 2013

Denzel Washington's great, he's versatile, self-contained and possibly the most down-to-earth movie star out there. Robert Zemeckis's great too, okay there've been a few misses like Death Becomes Her (oh dear, oh dear, oh dear) and A Christmas Carol where Jim Carrey plays a digitally animated avatar of Jim Carrey who just happens to look a bit like Dickens's Scrooge.

So, we sat down to Flight one Friday night expecting, well, something.

Don't get me wrong, it's okay. Washington is great as a down on his luck alcoholic, drug-using pilot who's basically, not to put too finer a point on it, an arsehole. Amongst the arsehole-ness Washington's character manages to pull off an incredible piece of flying in the first 30 minutes of the movie that saves the lives of his passengers when the plane he's piloting suffers a catastrophic mechanical failure. And, well, that's just about it...

Denzel's drunk a lot. We don't want him to be so drunk, we want him to pull through, we want him to come out of the air accident investigation smelling of roses actually because he's Denzel and he's saved all those lives. But he just gets drunk and drugged up and after a period when he's clean and we think he's made it, he gets totally out of it again. Washington's performance is good, the direction is very competent but the story, beyond a character study of how an arsehole behaves - like an arsehole basically - even when he does something quite amazing, is what you'd expect. John Goodman has a great cameo as Washington's celeb-style narcotics supplier of choice, adding much needed colour and distraction.

Disappointingly unconvoluted and whilst there is a redemptive message in the end, we wanted a lot more meat in this particular sandwich. Really wanted to like this a whole lot more, perhaps I am missing something because lots of other much better qualified people than me seem to have loved it.

*** Three Stars.