Just Plane Scary
"Flightplan" is effective at providing some temporary thrills. (Film Review)
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: It's a fun ride while it lasts.
The Downside: It's a fun ride- while it lasts.
It's funny- the way some movies come in twos. Coming just a month after Wes Craven's Red Eye, Flightplan marks the second movie this year that you probably won't find screened on your next four-hour jaunt across country. Then again, after 140 passengers on a crippled JetBlue airliner this week got to watch their own peril for hours on end as they waited to make a crash landing, who's to say? Both films are thrillers that try to use the unique claustrophobic feeling of an airliner to their advantage. Red Eye was more of a psychological duel between a man and a woman locked into a pair of business-class seats. Because the conflict was limited to simply the use of an air phone, the movie had to rely on the skill of its actors and its dialogue to pull it off (which it did quite well). Flightplan is more of an uneasy melding of Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes and, well, Die Hard. It features a heroin who, conveniently, has a working knowledge of aircraft mechanics so takes it upon herself to dodge her way through numerous trap doors, compartments, and elevators while we wonder if she's the victim of some elaborate conspiracy of if the airline's stingy drink cart policy has made her go off the deep end. Flightplan allows its heroin a little more freedom of movement (sometimes a little too much, as I'll take issue with later), but deals with one perfectly baffling question- how can a child disappear on an airplane at 37,000 feet?
Kyle and Julia Pratt are boarding an airplane for a long, sad trip home. They live in Germany where Kyle works as a propulsion engineer and, coincidentally, knows the ins-and-outs of the very aircraft their flying on. A week before ,Kyle's husband took a header off the roof of their apartment building (the aftermath of this is dealt with in a clever house-of-mirrors way during the opening credits sequence). Now, Kyle and Julia are flying the body of their loved one home for the funeral. Kyle falls asleep and wakes up three hours later.
Julia is gone.
At first, the idea isn't as strange as it sounds. The aircraft Kyle and Julia are riding on aren't like the airliners I remember from my travels to visit relatives as a kid. At times, the interior looks like it was borrowed from a luxury liner: three levels, four hundred passengers, and even a stylish lounge that made me wonder how they keep the bottles from flying everywhere during rough landings. A lot of ground for a child to explore, so Kyle first reacts with concern, but not outright alarm. After all, she had to have gone somewhere, right?
The biggest asset to Flightplan's good graces is its pacing. It eases us right into the frantic maelstrom of a panicked mother with just the right finesse. Too much and Kyle would look hysterical. Not enough and we'd begin to wonder why we ought to care. It's when none of the passengers are able to account for Julia, and some of the crew begin to question whether or not she was even aboard in the first place, that Kyle's anxiety slides into terror.
Unlike Red Eye, which built itself on a fast-paced verbal tit-for-tat conflict, Flightplan goes more for developing ominous atmosphere. Somehow, the lighting on an all-night flight seems perfectly appropriate to bathe everyone from the flight attendants to the other passengers (this is the first movie in which the passengers- all of them, not just a few colorful characters, play an active part) in a sinister glow. Has someone on board kidnapped Julia? Are other people helping cover it up? I also liked a little plot twist thrown in later that questions whether or not Kyle did in fact get on the plane with her.
This is where I hit a wall. Flightplan in its nature is kind of like a disposable camera, meant to be used once then tossed away. I enjoyed it while I watched it. I have no idea if the physics and spatial geography of the movie work out, but it at least seems like it knows how a person could manage to sneak into the avionics bay through one of the on-board lavatories. Composer James Horner's minimalist music cues are also used to great, sparing effect, never being allowed to pump melodrama into a scene in which the dialogue contains all the capsules of dread we need.
But is Flightplan a one-shot deal? Some brain teasers like The Sixth Sense long outlive the time that their "secrets" remain so, if only because people want to return again and again to revisit the mastery of how it was done in the first place. I'm not sure this is the case with Flightplan. It eventually has to answer all the bizarre questions that it sets up and here, at least, it doesn't really cheat. No, the solution makes no logical sense, but it is believable within the reality of the story, and that's all that matters. However, while the solution works, it did leave me wanting a little more. I guess I was waiting for extraordinary and got functional, instead. There are plenty of fine touches outside of the movie's core (gotta love the crusty mannerisms of the flight attendants), but I doubt it is enough to make a film that is more than the sum of its parts. And like Red Eye, Flightplan has to deal with some inherent absurdities of its own situation. I can't count the number of times Kyle managed to get away from Carson (Peter Sarsgaard), the soft-spoken air marshal who becomes charged with watching over her, but it's definitely more than a half-way competent marshal would allow.
I won't say anything more because the meat of enjoyment Flightplan is likely to provide stems directly from the answers to the puzzles it gives us. It sets up a rather keen mystery, gives it some credibility- and some marginally interesting characters, to boot. Jodie Foster is never in want for a strong performance, but I'm not the first person to say she's probably played the protective, pissed-off mother bird a few too many times. The biggest pleasure here is seeing professional villain Sean Bean, as the plane's straight-arrow pilot, in a role that is slightly sympathetic.
Flightplan is a good movie, but at the end of the day it may not have what it needs for an endurable shelf-life. It is well made, provides some interesting trivia (two of the film's stars, Sarsgaard and Bean, are notoriously fearful of flying), but holds nothing it its cards to make us want to come back again and again. When the ending credits rolls, it's trays to their full and upright position- and everyone off the plane. B
HOME