"That's a nice-a donut."
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Flightplan (2005)
After an absence from cinema for over three years, other than a brief cameo in last year's A Very Long Engagement, Jodie Foster is back in the airplane thriller Flightplan. Foster is Kyle Pratt, a woman who is still grieving after her husband jumped off a tall building just a couple days before. Along with her six-year old daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston), she is taking the body from Germany back home to the United States to be buried. After falling asleep on the flight, she realizes that Julia is missing. Frantically she searches the plane, but encounters resistance when nobody - neither any of the passengers nor the flight crew - remembers the girl even being there. She isn't even on the passenger manifest! An air marshal, Carson (Peter Sarsgaard), steps in to calm things down and soon enough Kyle is pegged as a security risk. Logic would suggest that she is either making things up or is mentally unstable, after all, she had imagined being with her dead husband just one night before. But she keeps pushing, determined to learn the truth even if it means being arrested.
Flightplan is a movie with a great premise; it easily calls to mind Alfred Hitchcock's early British classic The Lady Vanishes in which a young woman is stumped when the kind old lady she meets on a train disappears and no other passengers remember her even being there. It also has elements that call to mind an eerie television show like The Twilight Zone or, for a more recent and better comparison, Lost. Wherein, for every question that is seemingly answered, another 3 to 5 questions are born.
It is a complex puzzle that will likely either leave you impressed and dazzled or have your head spinning. The movie is tense and fast-paced, as it should be. The set design is top notch, as the deluxe jumbo airliner becomes a key character in the story. And Sarsgaard is great as always, showing some impressive range here, while Foster is solid and makes you wonder why she doesn't take on more roles with her talent. But novice director Robert Schwentke has created a film that is rather cold and distant in the first two-thirds of the picture. I didn't care as much as I was probably supposed to about whether or not the daughter is found. Things eventually take a wild turn, in a move that will likely create strong reactions one way or the other. Overall, this is a decent movie, but more of the popcorn-variety than anything else. I was mildly disappointed in it. It will be interesting to see how the movie fares with subsequent viewings.
The Verdict: B-.
Michael Bentley 3:55 PM
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