Entertainingly ridiculous? Or ridiculously entertaining? Plane! Gerard Butler crashes his commercial airliner on a remote jungle island and then has to ensure the survival of his passengers. It’s like Lost, except instead of smoke monsters and mysterious hatches there are guerrilla terrorists who will kidnap you for ransom. Probably poisonous snakes and stuff, too, but there’s no mention of anything like that. Which is a major oversight here, to be honest.
Anyway, yes, air travel is definitely getting worse.
Plane has a lot in common with Beast, from last summer, the Idris-Elba-fights-a-lion movie: it’s exactly what we’re told it’s going to be, with no mess, no fuss, no subtext, no deep meaning… little meaning of any kind at all, in fact, just a slick of wild nonsense slapped over an uninspired undercoat. (We maybe should be a little bit worried about what feels like a new faux audacity in our popcorn movies. Two could be a coincidence. Three will be a trend. I am keeping my eye on the upcoming Adam-Driver-versus-dinosaurs movie 65. [ETA: My eye on 65 has not inspired hope.]) Plane is just about enjoyable enough while you’re onboard, and then it’s instantly forgettable once you disembark. It’d be the perfect movie to watch on a plane, if it didn’t feature probably the most horrific nightmare-at-40,000-feet sequence onscreen in decades, since Cast Away.
Although… maybe airlines will decide that Plane is acceptable fare in the air, because after his Trailblazer flight from Singapore to Tokyo is hit by lightning and loses all power, danged if Captain Brodie Torrance (Butler: Greenland, Angel Has Fallen) doesn’t actually land his MD-80(ish) aircraft intact on aforementioned island. It’s a display of calm, cool, professional competence worthy of Chesley Sullenberger himself — you know, the real-life commercial airline pilot who, in 2009, safely landed a real-life plane on the Hudson River in New York after a birdstrike, with only the most minor of casualties resulting. It could be an oddly comforting thing to watch when you’re sitting in a tin can somewhere over the Atlantic.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Plane’s screenplay — by Charles Cumming and J.P. Davis — was in part inspired by the Miracle on the Hudson. But if disaster is averted in the air here, it shall not be avoided on the ground: this is not that sort of movie. It’s the sort of movie in which swarthy bad guys (the island is in the Philippines) are out for blood and ransom, as mentioned, and are just plain generally menacing and nasty. The head villain is played by Evan Dane Taylor, a stunt performer turned actor and an American of Filipino, African American, and Native American descent. He’s good, and I hope he gets to play a less clichéd part in his next film.
What comes after the unscheduled landing is mostly a lot of cliché, too: shootouts and the like, and they’re not terribly gripping. But director Jean-François Richet does create some engrossing stuff out of silence, as in the sequence where Torrance and his sidekick, passenger Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter: Zero Dark Thirty, Men in Black III), rescue the kidnapped passengers and crew under the noses, and ears, of the bad guys, real quiet-like. (Gaspare happens to have a Particular Set of Skills that are coming in very handy in this unlikely situation.) And Torrance has a still, solitary moment right at the end of the movie the likes of which movies like this one don’t usually offer their ass-kicking male protagonists, a coming-down from the adrenaline and the stress that’s been fueling him. It’s an overt touch of anti-toxic masculinity — in a movie that, for all its absurdities, never renders Torrance or Gaspare as caricatures of manliness — and it’s nice to see.
Also very nice to see: Tony Goldwyn (All I Wish, The Belko Experiment) as the corporate fixer whom Trailblazer execs bring into their HQ to manage the human and PR calamity that is one of their planes going missing. Lionsgate really missed a trick not highlighting his presence here in the marketing, because he elevates everything.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit Gerard Butler movies…
more films like this:
• Sully [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV]
• Snakes on a Plane [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | HBO Max US]
I had absolutely no interest in this, then you drop Tony Goldwyn’s involvement and now I’m. . . well, still probably going to pass, tbh. But dang you’re right that his presence should have been advertised!
Thanks, as always, for all you do here.
I don’t know why Tony Goldwyn isn’t a huge star. It’s a crime.