Quick review of "Flightplan"

Flightplan
Rated PG-13 for Violence and intense situations
Directed by Robert Schwentke
Starring Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, and Sean Bean

"Flightplan" asks several questions to start off. The first is the tagline, "How could someone disappear into thin air?" Kyle (Foster) is a propulsion engineer for an aircraft manufacturer, and we join her the night before she and her daughter, Julia, are to get on a brand-new plane (which she helped design) to move to the United States. They are also escorting Kyle's dead husband back to Long Island. His casket is a constant, and ghostly character throughout. Once the flight gets airborne, Foster and her daughter move to the last few rows of the plane so that they can stretch out and sleep. When Kyle wakes up, Julia is gone. A frantic search of the plane returns nothing but more questions, because the crew discovers that Julia was never checked in for the flight, isn't on any passenger manifests, and was never seen by any crew or passengers. This is one of the spots where the movie succeeds in overcoming the horribly expository previews, because the idea that nobody noticed a little girl on a flight is plausible enough for us to stick with Kyle's assertion that her daughter WAS on the plane, but the mountains of evidence against her create enough doubt that we're just not really sure.

So the next question is, "could Kyle, a grieving wife, ALSO be a grieving mother of a child who died tragically, and now she can't accept the reality in which she's placed?" Again, the evidence is very pursuasive. The answer comes late in the movie, but the entire lead-up, which couldn't have lasted more than an hour (the flick clocks in at 93 minutes) feels like it takes forever, because you pretty much know everything if you saw any trailers. There's a whole lot of Jodie Foster looking nervous and scared, and a whole lot of Jodie Foster taking off running down the aisles of the plane (seriously, had to have been like a dozen of those scenes, sometimes for absolutely no reason). After about 45 minutes, we get it, she can't find her daughter. The crew doesn't believe her, and she's got a little bit of self-doubt as well. But not enough to not notice something that TOTALLY convinces her that Julia is alive, well, and on the plane. But there's still more running, still more confusion and red herrings. Finally, we get an answer to everything, and it's a tad more pedestrian than I was hoping for.

All in all, Flightplan is a passable suspense flick, and some of the questions raised are interesting enough to make you want to stick around. How strong is a mother's intuition? Strong enough to overcome overwhelming contrary evidence? Strong enough to create a fictional reality? That's the real puzzler, and fortunately we don't get the answers until right before everyone else does, in a reveal that was very slickly done, and (I thought) not too too obvious. Still, there was no new ground covered.

Part of the reason the suspense in Flightplan works is that we've all been on airplanes. We've all experienced the numbed senses, the heightened stress, and the microcosmical community in the fuselage. So we sit there, and we can feel how helpless you are as a passenger at times, how limited your space and options are. There's some good psychology here, but it gets nullified a bit by the flaws in the film. For instance, there's a brief Arab terrorist angle, which at first is handled quite well, but upon further review is just an extra 10 minutes of interplay that have nothing to do with the plot. The only way to possibly resolve the film's most glaring error* is to subscribe to the idea that the first 15 minutes of the movie are actually Kyle's dream -- but we're never really given any reason to believe that.

The finish is well-paced, and not too long (I was really nervous that the filmmakers were going to make me sit through a 20-minute chase on an airplane). It does leave a little to be desired, but I'm trying to keep this spoiler-free except for the note below, so I'm going to just leave it at that. Foster is good, if a little over the top, and Sarsgaard is once again excellent, and believable at every turn. Sean Bean is also very good as the captain (and maybe the only character in the entire film that we can trust). Overall, there's some interesting psycho-drama, moreso than I expected, but I'm not sure it makes up for some serious reaches in logic.

Rating: 2 1/2 stars (out of 4)












(*-SPOILER: The entire Arab angle is just insulting, but not for the reasons I expected. Actually, I thought the use of our own post-9/11 fears was a good sidebar to the plot. However, why in the HELL did we think we saw those two guys in the window across the way before Kyle and Julia left the apartment? That was just silly, and as I mentioned, the only way it could work is if Kyle was dreaming everything leading up to Julia's disappearance. But we shouldn't have to deduct something like that. Again, 10 minutes of action that didn't need to happen.)