IvanF's Cut and Paste, No-Name Theatrical Review of Flightplan 2005...

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Afterall, I avoided Red Eye thanks to the fucking pink eye that its trailers kept giving me... So what could really be so hard about avoiding the next, generic airplane thriller to come off the coat-tails of 9/11?...

The thing is, I'm a fucking sucker for good deals... and Flightplan at fucking four dollars for a theatre ticket, was just too perfect to give up...

And the ads kept drawing me in... With Jodie fucking Foster (my old Hollywood crush) on the cover, and the words "Suckle Up" waving me in?... well, "Buckle Up" eye typo or not, I had to board this flight...

The critics were all correct. The last third of the movie is just plain Die Hard 2 ridiculous. But never in a good, Die Hard 1 sort of way... I mean yes, the big revelation about what was really going on in the plane was thought out. It all made sense...

It's just that, the revelation blew its cargo load to the audience way too bluntly, as if I was watching goddam Mr. Glass in Unbreakable all over again... It was all spelled out for us in one fucking minute flat. And right after that? The film became Die Hard with a fucking vengeance... except we had fucking Jodie Foster as the assassin with the taxi trigger finger this time around...

The action in the latter third wasn't that bad. We got some horrible CG explosions, and some really awful music. But for the most part, it was no worse than the last third of fucking Adaptation (guess the writers of this film took a page out of Charlie Kaufman's ideas for a film's last act... bad move I say, since Adaptation fucking sucked...)...

It's just that, all the action completely didn't match the tone of the film. It was like somebody switched off a light, and everyone's brains in the theatre were supposed to suddenly shut off as well...

Now, before the last third of the film? As all the critics have pointed out, Flightplan was brilliantly planned out as a Hitchcockian Thriller. Hell, you could almost see his shadow there, 37000 feet high in the air on the fucking wings of that luxury plane...

Hitchcock sucked cock. I'm sorry, but he was before my time. And he will forever be a bore for my time...

First of all, the grand prize of the movie was obviously trying to figure out if Kyle Pratt's daughter, Julia, was in fact real or not. And if she was, then where the fuck could they stash her on the plane?...

Well, my first initial reaction was obviously from watching too much goddam SciFi television... I mean, wasn't it obvious? They beamed her off the ship. Duh...

Besides that though? Jodie Foster's character did keep a nice pace with the game, always seemingly staying one step ahead of the audience... She would accuse the Arabs right when we would. She would want to check the cargo holds right when we thought of it. And if it wasn't for the trailers, I'm sure that none of us would've remembered that stupid heart thing that her daughter smeared onto the window... For the most part, Kyle Pratt was true to her engineering name, and stayed one step ahead in the game...

... well, if the game wasn't just so obvious in the goddam first place, that is...

Okay, first things first, I'm going to spoil the whole fucking movie here. For the most part, at least... simply because it was so damn obvious what was going on, that it ruined the whole fucking movie for me...

Clyde from Kinsey was obviously evil. Not only did he make that weird smirk at the start at Jodie, but he's a fucking Air Marshall as well... C'mon already. He was sitting near Jodie conveniently, he has a fucking gun with him, and he looks like a fucking serial killer who enjoys fucking little lost boys for fun. How the fuck can't he be guilty?...

Well, first things first, I didn't want her to be fucking real. I hated the bitch actress girl that played her... Why the hell must thrillers always try to make the kids seem cute and eerie at the same damn time? It freaks me out... How the hell would we ever want this fucking girl to be alive and be real, when she's so damn creepy, that she might as well be a ghost?... I know that was sort of the point. But it really ruined everywhere when I put two and two together, and figured out where the fuck she was... as I really didn't want the bitch to survive...

I didn't catch which stewardess was in Avionics at the same. All I do remember thinking to myself, was that there was some goddam reason why the camera angle was so damn shifty eyed in that one scene alone. Hell, you could almost hear the villain stroking his monstrous mustache in that scene... So either Julia was being held there, there was a fucking bomb on the plane in that room, or a fucking desperate housewife was strapped to the rail tracks while a fucking bullet train was speeding her way...

... serves me right, for actually going into a movie theatre with my goddam brain on...

And now thanks to me, I've just ruined the whole movie for you two readers out there. Cheers...

The thing is, the only surprise this movie even remotely supplied for me, was the fact that Sean Bean's character of the captain, wasn't in on the whole thing in the end. I mean, isn't there an unwritten law or something, that he has to play a villain in each and every movie he appears in?... Just like Bill Paxson has to die in every single film he's in, otherwise the movie shall suck?...

Sean Bean was definitely the best part of the movie. You couldn't tell which side he was on... He definitely seemed to do everything in his power for Kyle Pratt. Was it simply out of protocol, or did he really give a damn about Ms. Jodie Foster and her tragic circumstances?... Hard to say, but his character was definitely interesting in the end. He showed a lot of pathos for the lost little girl, he showed a ton of real fear when the bomb threat finally appeared, and you could visibly feel the remorse in his eyes when he realized the truth of it all...

Now, I suppose Jodie Foster was decent in her role herself. Like I said, if stupid ominous camera angles and smirks hadn't given the whole damn movie away to me, then I would've probably enjoyed how she always stayed a step and a half in front of the crowd... As an engineer myself, I liked her little switching of the cables to freak out the whole plane with a cabin pressure warning. I liked her ideas of how to check on her coffin, and how she would ask all the little questions that would finally lead her to the truth... In fact, I don't think there's a single question she didn't ask in this movie that I would've asked myself. Her only damn mistake, was trusting the damn Air Marshall on board with the goddam evil gun and grin...

But her character just was too one-dimensional for my own goddam pleasure. The whole movie was about her either being morbidly depressed from her husband's suicide, or her freaking the hell out about where her daughter may have gone... Sure, for a thriller, those are traditionally the only emotions an actress needs to really emote. The point of a Hitchcockian thriller, is simply to elicit a response in the audience, of the primal kinds of fears you feel 37000 feet up in the air...

Now, despite my misforgivings about the tiny bitch with the sixth sense, Flightplan was a well crafted, well thought-out, and a pretty well designed movie overall... What else could I expect from an aeronautics engineer, afterall?...

... but alas, the film still tasted like bitter, goddam airline food in the end...

... keep an eye out, if any airline ever does play Flightplan or Red Eye as their goddam in-flight movie someday...

That any movie with Sean Bean in it, where he doesn't turn out to be a villain?...