Review of Flightplan (2005) by Davidm. — 23 Feb 2006

Suspenseful movies are often compared to roller-coaster rides because the twists and turns and ups and downs are what make watching them such a thrill. The problem with "Flightplan" is that it is like a roller-coaster with only one hill.

[***SPOILERS***] The tension builds steadily from the beginning, where we aree treated with fractured, inter-woven images of a grieving aeronautics engineer named Kyle Pratt who has lost her husband to a fall from the roof of their residence in Berlin.

She is escorting her traumatized daughter Julia home to America, along with her husband in a casket. When the exhausted and emotionally frazzled mother falls asleep on the plane she helped design, she wakes to find Julia missing.

At first she is calm and prudent in her search of the luxurious two-story jumbo jet. It's only when she cannot find her daughter, and not a single one of the passengers or crew admits seeing the child ever come on board that we begin to question Kyle's hold on reality.

The flight attendents begin to think she's delusional, and the captain discovers evidence she very well might be. But we *saw* Julia board the plane. Or did we? "Flightplan" forces the audience as well (as the sleepy-eyed Air Marshall Carson played by Peter Sarsgaard) to ask several hard questions.

How can a 6-year-old girl vanish mid-flight on an airplane? Why would someone even hatch such a plan? What makes Julia, or her mother, so special? When the reasons are revealed and the villain of the movie are finally unmasked is when this roller-coaster plummets towards the earth and never quite recovers.

The underlying plot that threatens Pratt and her daughter is so outlandish and unecessarily elaborate that one might believe Rube Goldberg was the mastermind behind it all. Suspension of disbelief is not enough to save us from wishing the ride was simply over.

What saves the film at all is the superb acting from Jodie Foster and Sean Bean. Foster always appears to be riding the edge of hysteria and madness, yet she skillfully manipulates the circumstances, the crew and Sarsgaard's air marshall to find her daughter.

She never for a moment doubts what she is doing, and that means we can not be sure she is fully enveloped in her own grief-fed delusion. Sean Bean, who normally plays villains, is the firm and unflappable master of the airplane who knows he is responsible for the 400+ lives on the plane yet understands that Foster's character is one of those lives.

He matches Pratt's unwavering dedication point for point and serves as a much better foil than Carson, whose role is mostly relegated to glowering at Pratt like a surly guard dog. "Flightplan" borrows heavily from the classic Hitchcock film "The Lady Vanishes", but it cannot live up to the master of suspense.

In "Flightplan"s case, it's the plot that ends up vanishing.