Review of Flightplan (2005) by Markb. — 09 Oct 2005

If Jodie Foster is only going to treat us to a film performance every three years or so, she'd be better advised to join forces with Robert DeNiro for Taxi Driver: 30 Years Later, in which Travis Bickle and Iris reunite and join forces to blast away panhandlers, jaywalkers and other vermin infesting the streets of Rudolph Giuliani's Disneyfied New York than to do anything like this laughably contrived, ridiculously ineffective Panic Room In The Sky.

She plays a distraught mom transporting her recently deceased husband's body from Germany to the U.S.; things get complicated when she loses her little daughter on the flight and even more so when questions arise among the crew and other passengers as to whether the child ever existed in the first place.

Much justifiable complaining has already been done about the film's final act, and I won't divulge any of it for you--not because it's not nice to print spoilers, but because there's more than enough, uh, love to spread around to cover this movie's ENTIRE 93 minutes!! For starters, setting the action on a superjet half the size of Delaware is comletely nonconducive to suspense; the people who made the 1952 cop-on-a-train thriller The Narrow Margin, the original Speed, and the current Red Eye were all intensely aware of a simple but necessary component in transportation-based thrillers that Flightplan is obviously, completely unaware of: claustrophobia.

(Put it this way: spending half the movie's running time thinking about what the Zucker Brothers could've done with the Ponderosa-sized set doesn't exactly whiten my knuckles.) The flight crew and personnel are, to a one, depicted as so thoroughly insensitive to Foster's situation that I'm surprised that more flight attendants aren't picketing theaters showing this movie for defamation of character than conservative Christians protested The Last Temptation Of Christ back in 1988! For that matter, of the 400-plus passengers, isn't it within the realm of possibility that at least a few of them (especially the other parents on board) would treat Foster with some compassion and consideration rather than responding to the admittedly unique circumstances with complete selfishness and heartlessness--even if their plans WERE being disrupted? (Don't get me started on Flightplan's shoddy and offensive exploitation of post 9/11 fears of Arab passengers.

) The movie's use of astonishingly unbellievable coincidences not only breaks several simple dramatic laws but invents new ones to mercilessly stomp on; in Speed, having Sandra Bullock ride the bus because she had her license revoked, making her the perfect candidate to keep the bus going over 50 mph was a believable and pleasing piece of serendipity; having Foster be this plane's architect and therefore know every place to look is contrived beyond forgiveness.

(Or, as Saturday Night Live's Church Lady would've said, "How con-VEEEEE-nient!") You can't fault Foster's very effectively tense performance at all (the fact that she fights like a girl notwithstanding) except that it's utterly wasted in the service of such disgracefully substandard material: watching her here is like seeing a world-class concert violinist performing in a Chuck E.

Cheese's. On the other hand, Peter Sarsgaard, normally a terrific actor (Kinsey, Garden State, Shattered Glass) is currently the leading candidate for2005's Nails-On-The-Blackboard award for his surprisingly irritating impersonation of an alternately sympathetic and suspicious air marshal, and would someone please remove the Scotch tape from his eyelids? Of course, the possibility exists that I'm completely misreading this movie, and perhaps everything that's wrong with it should be interpreted as a microcosm for all the troubles that the airline industry has faced in the last few years.

If that's the case, perhaps the same advice applies to spending good money on first-class flights AND an evening centered around Flightplan: Fly coach instead.