Since Kat said she wouldn’t mind more movie reviews, and I don’t have anything particularly interesting to write about today, I thought I’d write about a movie I just watched. It was “Flightplan” with Jodie Foster, which I thought looked interesting back when it was in the theaters, but I never got out to see it. So since it was on HBO yesterday, I figured I’d give it a go. And it wasn’t bad, as far as suspense/mysteries go. But it wasn’t great, either. By the way, if you haven't seen it, and you WANT to, and you want to be surprised, don't read the rest of this. Because I'm pretty much throwing out all the spoilers here...
Jodie Foster plays a propulsion engineer (ooooo… I think I’m supposed to be impressed by that…) named Kyle (isn’t that a guy’s name??) who lives in Berlin and helps design planes for a company like Boeing (except it wasn’t called Boeing, of course… and I can’t remember what it WAS called, because I don’t think it was all that important). At the beginning of the movie, her husband either jumps or falls from the roof of their apartment building, and she immediately decides to head back to New York with her six-year-old daughter, along with her husband’s locked casket – and only she knows the combination to open it.
The plane they’re traveling on is like a double-decker DC-10 – which I think is similar to the new Airbus 380s being developed. So while it LOOKS like a crazy huge imaginary plane, it’s actually not too far off in the future. So the concept of a huge plane was kind of cool – pretty soon, we really will be flying across oceans on giant planes with dozens of bathrooms and galleys and nooks and crannies. And that became the main problem in the movie – halfway through the flight, Kyle (yeah, definitely a guy’s name) wakes up from a nap to discover her daughter is missing. But it’s a plane, so she can’t have gone far, right? A cursory search turns up no sign of the little girl, and soon the ONE air marshal on board (ONE air marshal for a double-decker DC-10??) offers to help with the search.
But as the search continues, and the girl seems to have vanished (her backpack and boarding pass are gone, too) Kyle gets increasingly paranoid. She convinces the pilot to search the baggage area, and various other areas of the plane normally off-limits to passengers. And then Kyle notices – gasp! – Arab men on board, who she’s certain she’s recently seen somewhere. She all but accuses them of taking her daughter… no wait, she DOES accuse them of taking her daughter.
Fortunately, the movie spares us the hackneyed “Arab hijacker” scenario, and instead finally reveals the true bad guy – it’s the air marshal. Oops, if you haven’t seen the movie I may have just ruined it for you. Actually, nah, that was sort of my feeling from the very beginning. Anyway, as Kyle starts freaking out and running through the plane looking for her daughter, she’s confronted by the pilot, who informs her that he’s just heard from a hospital in Berlin, and not only is her husband dead, but her daughter is as well. They BOTH fell from the roof of the apartment.
But Kyle refuses to believe this, and, as someone who had a hand in designing the plane, she manages to get into the baggage area herself, where she skillfully detaches and cuts various wires to cause the oxygen masks to drop from the ceiling, and the lights to go off. She then finds her husband’s casket, and unlocks it to make sure her daughter isn’t trapped in there. At this point, the lonely, single, solitary air marshal finds her and drags her back up to her seat, where she’s forced to talk to a creepy therapist who happens to be on board.
Meanwhile, the air marshal tells the pilot that Kyle is a hijacker, and she’s demanding a huge sum of money be transferred to an account. He then returns to that open casket in the baggage area, and removes a couple bombs he had hidden in there. And finally, he runs up to the nose of the plane, where no one has looked yet, and bingo! – there’s the little girl, sedated and sleeping, surrounded by avionics. And that’s where he plants the bombs, so that when the plane lands and the passengers have disembarked (he’s not trying to kill everyone... he's only partially crazy), he can kill Kyle, set off the bomb, and all traces of the little girl will be erased.
And of course Kyle finally manages to find her little girl, and the air marshal is the one who gets erased, and all the passengers who thought Kyle was crazy finally see that she DOES, in fact, have a real, live daughter. But when it was over, I got to thinking what a crazy premise this was. I mean, the real hijacker was trying to hijack the plane without actually hijacking it but rather making it look like someone else was hijacking it. In order to do this, he had to find someone who knew all about the plane, push her husband off a roof to make it look like an accident/suicide, plant bombs in the coffin, kidnap her kid on a huge plane without anyone seeing, and then ASSUME that she would be nutty enough to run through the plane like a crazy woman, so her credibility and sanity would be questioned. He also had to assume that she’d eventually get down to that casket and unlock it, since she was the only one with the combination. It’s an awfully elaborate and complicated plan to coerce people into wiring money to your account.
So the movie was slightly suspenseful now and then, but I’d say a little too predictable. And not very realistic. I mean, seriously – ONE air marshal?? That's just crazy...
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