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Flightplan September 25, 2005 |
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This might sound like something out of a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode, but here goes nothing. For your approval, a woman, possibly 41, is traveling with her young daughter on a Berlin to New York flight when, after a brief nap, the woman wakes up to find the girl missing, vanished into thin air. The woman, maybe delusional, disrupts the flight with constant ravings about her missing daughter, but the catch is, nobody ever saw the girl, there is no record of her being on the plane, and worst of all, records from a Berlin coroner’s office say the girl is already dead, having died with her father a week back during his successful suicide leap from his apartment building. Early in the proceeding we see the girl, the woman certainly sees her, and maybe even the new stewardess on the airplane sees her, but is reluctant to commit, and what serves as the basis for the new mid-air mystery thriller “Flightplan” is whether or not just seeing the girl is a matter of fact, or one mother’s desperate attempt to hold onto what’s already been lost. In the classic ‘Twilight Zone’ episode, it was William Shatner slowly going mad over a shifty gremlin tearing the plane’s win to pieces, in Otto Preminger’s “Bunny Lake is Missing” it was Carol Lynley panicking when her little girl goes missing from a school nobody knew she attended, and here, it’s Jodie Foster franticly pacing up and down a massive two-story luxury airliner to find the precious daughter everybody on the plane believes doesn’t exist. There are only two ways out of this mystery, one, that the woman is indeed delusional, gone insane with grief over the loss of her family, or two, that somebody is playing a cruel trick on her, possibly from revenge, or to extort money, and by the end of “Flightplan”, when all is revealed, it’s not so much a surprise which one it is, but an unfortunate necessity, and a bit of a letdown, because any way you slice it, a premise as goofy and sensational as this one is bound to suffer from climactic fatigue. Foster plays Kyle Pratt, a woman we first meet in a cold and sterile Berlin morgue, identifying the body of her husband after his unsuspected suicide. She has a puzzled, blank expression on her face, as if she suddenly realized that the world doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but what she doesn’t realize is that the dead husband is only the beginning of her problems; a grim prologue to the main event, her long, tiresome flight home and the chaos and confusion involved when her girl is kidnapped, or so she believes, and everybody thinks she’s crazy. The plane’s captain (Sean Bean) is sympathetic to a degree after she gives a moving speech about her husband’s death, the airline law enforcer (Peter Sarsgaard) is skeptical and grows impatient with her erratic behavior, the new stewardess (Erika Christensen) is altogether baffled by the whole situation, and the passengers grow anxious, as good passengers would, when their flight is suddenly put into danger by one out of control woman and her crazy beliefs about kidnapping and conspiracies against her. “Why would anyone want to kidnap your daughter,” questions the air marshal, who becomes more important to the plot as the film goes on, “what makes her so special, what makes you so special?” What keeps the plot from complete collapse is that we’re baffled by the mystery as well as the crew and passengers, and when Kyle, who just so happens to be an airplane designer, and knows the ins and outs of the mammoth plane’s inner workings (think “Prison Break”), starts running amok, sabotaging the plane’s light system and its oxygen mask release system, causing great panic, the entertainment factor begins to outweigh the fact that it’s all a bit implausible, which in a silly way is why TV shows like “Prison Break”, “24”, “Invasion” and, on a much higher level, “Lost”, are so fun and work so well. As a serialized TV show, “Flightplan” wouldn’t have worked, but as a cheap airplane thriller, with production values (the luxury airplane is a brilliantly designed set piece) triumphing over intelligence, it could have been worse. That’s not to say that the movie is spectacular, and doesn’t have it’s flaws, because it certainly does, and the fact that the whole thing hinges on the main character’s sanity, a character we never fully get close to, is a major problem, but what movie about a mysterious, implausible disappearing act doesn’t have holes and hasty explanations? Foster has done this stuff before, most recently in “Panic Room” (protective mother, claustrophobic space, danger, etc…), and she gives a typical Jodie Foster performance, filled with breathless paranoia, steely resolve, and heartfelt monologues, usually in close-up, highlighting her big, puffy eyes, morphing her character from grieving widow, to insane passenger, to action hero with little effort, and maybe because it is Jodie Foster, who we like in pretty much anything, we can forgive the simplistic “Have you seen my daughter?”, dialogue because she makes is sound more realistic than the situation dictates it to be. If I were on a plane and some raving lunatic started making a fuss about a phantom girl, I’d say shoot her full of muscle relaxant and be done with it, but that’s not going to solve anything in a fictional, highly stylized Hollywood thriller, where even the weakest of concepts can be salvaged by a memorable set design, a believable performance by a superstar, and an audience’s willingness to suspend logic for a breezy 100 or so minutes. Conceptually, “Flightplan” might never take off, but the bumpy ride is hardly a crash landing, and you can take those overused metaphors for all they’re worth. “Flightplan” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59. by Adam Suraf
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