Flightplan DVD Review [2]
Posted by Brian Berry on 01.26.2006
The worst Twilight Zone episode never written
The Film
In a classic Twilight Zone episode titled "Nightmare At 20,000 Feet," William Shatner plays a commercial air passenger who sees a hairy gremlin, gnawing at the plane's wing, during flight. Needless to say, Shatner is the only person who sees the beast and everybody around him thinks he's off his rocker. What results is a situation where the passengers are frightened of the crazy person and the crazy person fears the unseen. Such is the case with Flightplan where Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) plays a woman who swears her daughter is somewhere aboard an airplane but nobody recollects seeing the little girl. But this film is more Alfred Hitchcock than Twilight Zone. Sadly, there is no gremlin nor William Shatner involved in Flightplan. The inclusion of one or both would make this DVD rental worth at least half the fee.
There's an old creative writing exercise where a student writes the first sentence to a story and passes it to their classmate, who writes the second sentence. This continues until a group of students complete an entire story with a beginning, middle, and end. Such a hodgepodge of ideas can lead to fascinating work when the authors are in the fourth grade but, as evidenced by German director Robert Schwentke's Flightplan, the exercise doesn't bode well for Hollywood screenwriters Peter Dowling and Billy Ray. In Flightplan, each reel has the tone of an entirely different movie: the first thirty minutes feel like we're in M. Night Shyamalan's (Sixth Sense, The Village) supernatural/science-fiction territory, Hitchcockian suspense as we board the plane for act two, and finally the ridiculous, big action-thriller finale of act three. What this creates for the audience is a meandering mess of illogical situations and uneven direction that could either be construed as hilarious (I was one of two people in the theater laughing out loud) or just plain awful.
The premise to Flightplan sounds good on paper, borrowing heavily from Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. Kyle Pratt is a jet propulsion engineer aboard a plane from Berlin to New York to bury her recently deceased husband. Her six-year old daughter Julia (Malene Lawston) is along for the ride in the double-decker airbus that Kyle helped build. Kyle falls asleep shortly after take off and awakens to find Julia missing. The crew and passengers deny ever having seen Julia and no record of her presence appears on the flight manifest. To make matters worse, Kyle can't find Julia's boarding pass and backpack. Everybody aboard grows increasingly agitated as Kyle loses her cool and searches for Julia by all means necessary.
Directing his first American film, Schwentke doesn't have a clue what type of film he wants Flightplan to be. Is it a serious psychological thriller where we feel the inner pain of a woman looking for her daughter or is it a sloppy B-movie, meant to be plain old, sometimes hilarious, dumb fun?
The performances of Jodie Foster and Sean Bean, who plays the plane's captain, indicate the film should be taken seriously. Foster plays Kyle with increasing intensity, asking all the right questions when they come to our minds, and acting on logical maternal impulses. Her eyes grow more distraught, moist, and red as she begins to question her sanity and the dwindling hopes of her daughter's livelihood. This is easily Foster's best performance since The Silence of the Lambs. Sean Bean believably portrays Captain Rich with the type of curiosity, confliction, and professionalism we could only hope for in our captains.
Conversely, every other character belongs in a late night, USA Network movie. Peter Sarsgaard (Shattered Glass, Garden State), generally an impressive actor, looks fatigued, as if he's been on a meth bender for weeks while on the verge of laughing at the horrible dialogue he's assigned. The stewards, while addressing an interesting perspective on what they really think of passengers (hint: they really don't like you), come off unrealistically harsh toward Kyle's situation. Stephanie, played by Kate Beahan, takes the queen bitch cake as a stewardess who will do whatever possible to be unhelpful to Kyle. The seats are filled by caricatures of almost exclusively rich, white, American families (aren't there any non-Anglo, international travelers on this flight?). Many of the film's laughs, and it's difficult to tell whether the humor is intentional or not, come from these absurd seat dwellers.
"It's not like she lost a palm pilot," scoffs a balding, turtleneck sporting, designer glasses wearing, passenger in a snide, ‘get out of my country club' voice. You get the picture. One of the more troubling angles in the film involves the few non-white passengers aboard the plane.
What would a post-9/11 airplane picture be without mentioning we are in post-9/11 times? Alas, the only non-white passengers are, you guessed it, Middle Eastern men. Kyle accuses one of the men of abducting her daughter, citing that she saw him peering into her window earlier that morning. The man is angered, and rightfully so, but his friends calm him down. Just when you think these guys are in the film to address the global paranoia of potential terrorism and send the "can't we all just get along" message, the unthinkable happens. A couple scenes after the accusation, Kyle runs frantically down the plane's aisle and unexpectedly has her head SLAMMED into an armrest by the Middle Eastern man she accused of kidnapping.
We're lead to sympathize with this man just to have him assault our heroine shortly after. This type of disjointed storytelling makes the objective of the film seem silly, causing more laughs and disgust, depending on the viewer, as the film gets more and more far fetched.
All story bashing aside there were several likable aspects of the film. The interior of the double-decker jumbo jet, equipped with a top-shelf liquor bar, lounge area for the kiddies, and full restaurant is incredible. Whoever is behind the production design deserves recognition of this feat. Second, the increasingly bright, anxiety-inducing lighting of the cabin is also well done. As tensions rise so does the luminosity of the environment. Additionally, the claustrophobic tracking shots up and down the aisles, and dolly shots up and down the stairs, add to the increasing tension of the narrative. The audience must also question Kyle's sanity but at no time will want to side with the unlikable crew or her fellow passengers.
What's intriguing about Flightplan is the main question it raises: Is it possible to kidnap a child aboard a jumbo jet and, if so, what are the motives of the perpetrator(s)? The question is answered in the third act but not without one of the most awful plot twists in recent memory. And no, it's not a case of multiple personalities, for once. The climax is Die Hard-esque , only without the cool, quotable one-liners and fist pumping, shameless thrills of John McTiernan's film. The visual effects of the finale look fake and add to the film's downfall as well. You'll be kept guessing who the enemies are and what motives they have throughout.
Smarter writers would come up with better answers to the riddle. When you find out the surprise, you'll have already exited the plane, ready to go home and take a well-deserved nap.
SPECIAL FEATURES
After sitting through this movie for the second time (with commentary), I resented watching anything having to do with this film. The Making of Flightplan was fun to watch for the sole reason that the "creative minds" behind the movie seem convinced they made a watchable action-thriller.
The director commentary with Schwentke was painful to sit through; a prime example of an unnecessary feature.
The only section I enjoyed dealt with my favorite aspect of the movie…the E-474 jumbo jet! Cabin Pressure: Designing the Aalto E-474. Had I just watched this 10-minute feature nine times consecutively my time would've been better spent than a whole plane ride and child abduction's worth of Flightplan
THE AUDIO/VIDEO
Available in Dolby 5.1 surround and DTS 5.1 surround sound. English, French, and Spanish tracks available. The film was shot in a 2.35:1 widescreen format. Video and audio are adequate.
The 411: Flightplan had the potential to be a great Twilight Zone style psychological thriller. The ball dropped going into the second reel when the film decided to become a different style of movie, concluding with a preposterous final half hour of “what the fuck”-edness. The dramatic tension in Airplane was more believable than this throwaway.
