Flightplan

Review by Jason Gaston

Flightplan may look like it is a smart and tense thriller on its surface, but if you pay attention to the story and look at the dastardly plan that is brought forth through the course of this film, you'll recognize that it all relies on the extreme stupidity of the film's characters and a series of Rube Goldberg-like events that rely on happenstance and pure luck to succeed in the first place.

If you brought this plan to terrorize an airplane to al qeada, I think that they would laugh at you and then shoot you in the kneecaps for insulting them by even mentioning it.

Flightplan also relies on the gullibility and lack of intelligence in its audience. I'm sure this cock and bull story will probably appeal to the crowds lining up in video stores to buy Band Camp, but to the refined and intelligent it's just something that will cause you to slap your forehead in frustration with the poorly thought-out plot in a movie that, quite frankly, should have been a whole hell of a lot better.

Flightplan revolves around Jodie Foster who plays a woman taking the body of her dead husband (who either fell or jumped off of a building) home to America for the funeral. With her, she has her little daughter who is suffering severe emotional trauma from loosing her dad.

Sufficed to say, the events in Flightplan probably won't help her issues a lot.

The bad news is the kid is sickeningly cute and annoying in ways that Jake Lloyd could only dream about. The good news is, the kid isn't in the movie for very long.

After Jodie nods off for a couple of hours mid-flight, she awakens and finds that her daughter is missing. What's worse, not only is her daughter missing, but the crew tell her that they never saw her daughter in the first place and begin to suspect that this crazy lady doesn't have a daughter at all.

The rest of the movie involves Foster running amok and out of control to and thro in the aircraft outsmarting air marshals and the flight crew thanks to her intimate knowledge of the plane (which she helped design). Thankfully, this is a big ass plan and not one of those Southwest puddle jumpers or she would have been screwed and it would have been a short movie.

Unfortunately for the audience, they're not on a Southwest puddle jumper.

Of course, there's also the "stunning" revelation that Foster and her missing daughter are pawns in a manipulative plot and all of that happy nonsense. Really, this movie is Die Hard on a plane... So I guess it would be Die Hard 2... only that took place at an airport. So, this would be sort of like Turbulence which I guess is an improvement because Flightplan is a better movie than Turbulence. Of course, home movies of my cat is a better film than Turbulence.

So let's just call this movie what it is... a big walking, talking cliché predictable from beginning to end and dumb at every possible turn.

Flightplan looks great, Jodie Foster is wonderful as always, but this is the kind of plot that requires a bit too much suspension of disbelief on my part. Any plot holes are ignored, any obstacles are pushed to the side. This movie is all premise and no plot.

Jodie Foster and the excellent directing in this movie make Flightplan watchable even though you'll spend most of your time wondering what Jodie Foster is doing in this movie in the first place. Just bring your sick bag for the many moments of nauseating turbulence.

If it's any consolation, at least they probably won't show this turd on an airplane.