Flightplan

I've seen some silly movies in my time...but the titular "plan" in Flightplan is one of the dumbest, most outrageous, least-plausible movie scenarios ever. Without giving too much away, allow me to simply say that the evil scheme driving the action in Flightplan makes Homer Simpsons grease-selling business seem like an sage investment opportunity in comparison. The screenplay by Peter Dowling and Billy Ray promises a dynamite twist to satisfy its tantalizing premise, and instead you get a grandiose flight of fancy, of the type generally reserved for the films of Mel Brooks and the Marx Brothers.



So, here's the tantalizing premise...Aeronautical engineer and recent widow Kyle (Jodie Foster) and her daughter (Marlene Lawston) board a jumbo jet in Berlin, bound for New York. They're starting life anew after Kyle's husband took a mysterious "fall" off the roof of an apartment building. Ouch.

Kyle, who helped design the plane in which she's flying, falls asleep for an hour or so, and when she awakens...her daughter is gone. Some frantic searching follows, during which a few things are made clear:

(1) the odd guy who seemed to be flirting with her (Peter Sarsgaard) is actually one o' them undercover Air Marshals you heard a lot about post-9/11

(2) the flight manifest and other documents make no mention of Kyle being accompanied by a little girl in the first place

(3) the captain is played by well known British actor Sean "Boromir" Bean and a flight attendant is played by Traffic veteran Erika Christensen despite the fact that these are small, thankless, shitty roles

So we're left with only a few possibilities. Kyle is insane, and imagined that she had a daughter, and when we in the audience saw her daughter during the film's opening half-hourk, we were just seeing her hallucinations

OR

Her daughter is stashed somewhere and all these shady assholes are full of shit

That brings you to about 45 minutes in, and I won't spoil anything else. This first half of the film isn't poorly made or anything, although it isn't terribly memorable either. But the movie is a cheat. It sets up a situation that's seemingly impossible - how could a little girl go missing on a plane in mid-flight? - and promises an actual real-world solution. But then it can't deliver a real solution, so it cops out and comes up with some desperate explanation that makes absolutely no logical sense.

I'm reminded of that horrible Julianne Moore film The Forgotten from 2004. The movies have similar set-ups. In that film, Moore was a bereaved mother who was told, suddenly, that the son she was mourning had never existed in the first place. She had made up his memory to cover up for trauma in her past. The movie, like this one, presented a challenge in the first act. Can we come up with a solution to this riddle? How could there be such a vast conspiracy to convince someone that her child had never been born? To what end?

You watch the movie out of nothing more than curiosity. How will they solve this puzzle? And that's a pretty cheap form of entertainment to begin with, really. The Forgotten, like Flightplan, isn't entertaining in its own right...There's nothing compelling about the storytelling or the visuals, the performances are phoned in and forgettable (surprising considering the Jodester only appears in one movie every year or two), James Horner's score blends right into the background, director Robert Schwentke's camera tricks and fondness for glare grows old quickly...

You just keep watching to see how it will end. And then, like the last 10 pages of a Stephen King novel, the movie just limps to the finish line with a lame, bogus conclusion. The Forgotten actually had to fall back on a supernatural conspiracy to violate space-time as part of an alien experiment on Earth gone haywire to explain away its narrative leaps. And still, it holds together better and seems more probable than Flightplan.

Seriously, it's like Wile E. Coyote, Dr. Evil and Lucy Ricardo collaborated on a criminal enterprise, and the result was this movie. Avoid at all costs unless you're extraordinarily curious as to the depths of desperation and ineptitude to which hacky screenwriters and lazy development executives will stoop. (HINT: the lowest possible)

Oh, one more thing I should mention about the film. There's this odd, totally uneccessarily subplot in which Kyle accuses several Arab men on the plane of kidnapping her daughter. It's pretty clear that the angry Arab guys are a red herring, and later in the film, there seems to be a kind of tacit acknowledgment that Kyle was wrong to suspect the guys just because of their skin color. But, overall, the message of the movie seems to be that she's to be lauded for her efforts to find her daughter, rather than being reprimanded for her fairly egregious and open racism and hostility towards those of Middle-Eastern descent.

I'm not saying that it's not understandable a frenzied mother looking for her child might lash out at a stranger in a way that's inappropriate. I just don't see why you'd bring up this sort of situation in a movie if you have nothing to say about it, and the way the scenario is tied up in the film is pretty much completely racist. The Arab guy essentially concedes that he understands Kyle's racist reaction in light of the intensity of the situation...kind of a pat, self-congratulatory, forced Hollywood conclusion.