Review: Plane

Plane (spoilers)
Cert: 15 / 107 mins / Dir. Jean-François Richet / Trailer

What a world. In other times, a film of Plane's calibre would have been shuffled directly to video; in 2023 it's used to prop up ailing cinema schedules. Yes, The Butler is back! Everyone's favourite Caledonian commando returns as Brodie Torrance™, the white, middle-aged, single-dad, widowed-husband, troubled-past, diamond in the rough airline pilot who routinely turns up late to his own flights looking like he's slept in a skip and somehow not getting breathalised on every single step of the gangplank. A man who's spent so much time at high altitude, his oxygen-starved brain can't remember what accent it's supposed to be sending to his mouth.

For the avoidance of doubt, Brodie is Scottish™, a fact which gets mentioned in the script approximately every fifteen minutes as a sort of disclaimer to international audiences who won't be able to understand three out of every four words he says. Sadly, the territory where Gerard will achieve the lowest level of actual verbal decoding, is Scotland...

STORMY

But to the film. Brodie departs Singapore one dark and stormy night bound for the good old US of A, his small passenger manifest being bumped up by an accompanied felon who's being extradited after capture abroad. Flying through the maelstrom, the craft is struck by lightning causing a power-outage, meaning the captain is forced to make a crash landing on the first landmass which comes to sight. The plane touches down roughly, with two on-board fatalities. What's worse though, is that upon debarking the crew work out that this island is under the control of separatist militia, and the inhabitants of the plane won't be rescued by these people, but more likely taken hostage and/or just murdered. So it's up to Dark Horse Brodie Torrance to put his RAF-past into good use, and put his trust in the most dangerous man on the plane to help them all out...

So it's worth remembering that while The Nasty Militia come to be the film's antagonists through luck rather than judgement, all of this is caused by a lightning strike as Gerard flies through a storm. Yes for clarity, the real bad-guy in this movie is weather. Although given the carbon-footprint of launching a 155-seater McDonnell Douglas MD-80*¹ just to carry 14 passengers, it certainly feels like mother nature's ire is justified.

JACK

A po-faced survival thriller custom designed for all the dad-heroes in the audience, the problem with Plane is that is just isn't very good. Butler seems to be playing a dialled-down version of his usual action-hero hoping for gravitas, but comes off as chronically tired instead. The script doesn't have his usual level of quippery, and charisma isn't making up the shortfall. And sure, maybe Gerard's not quite right for the part, but after Willis, Gibson, Neeson and Statham, who else is answering the phone in 2022?

Mike Colter strives as Louis Gaspare, the handcuffed antihero on sudden day-release, but the film only uses him for action sequences and does absolutely nothing to actually explore let alone redeem him. Everyone else is set-dressing, there are no characters in this movie. Most of the faces here are barely even archetypes. Once the separatist militia villains arrive, this turns into exactly the sort of mildly xenophobic action thriller we've all been expecting since the titles. Maybe not to Besson-levels, but even Captain Phillips bothered to find out what it was the pirates actually wanted.

There is some interesting camerawork in the film's combat scenes, to the point where you can tell this was all director Jean-François Richet was really interested in capturing. Although to be fair, that's a charge which can be levelled at a large percentage of the target audience, as well. Truth be told, at a nuts-and-bolts level the film is about as well assembled as you could hope for this sort of thing. The problem here isn't the execution but the product itself, the first screenplay seemingly written by ChatGPT*².

SNOWMAN

Apart from anything else, the plane's only in the air for 19 minutes. By that logic they might as well have called the movie 'Shirt', at least Gerard waits the full half hour before ditching that. In a just universe, that craft would have come down on the island from H.P. Lovecraft's Dagon, then we could spend the rest of the film watching every character wish they'd smashed into the sea instead.

Despite the occasional feint in the direction of a plot twist the film is reassuringly linear, and no matter how wide-eyed and earnest Gerry gets with his mugging to camera, Plane is bland, disposable and frankly boring. Of course it could be worse. We should probably think ourselves lucky that Mark Wahlberg wasn't flying it...

Asda. End of aisle cardboard pop-up.
Gifts for Father's Day.
£2.

*¹ Seriously, I fucking love plane-geeks just like I fucking love train-geeks. If Star Wars didn't take up all my brain-shelves I'd totally be in one of those clubs. Magnificent work you beautiful people. ^{[ BACK ]}


*² Spoilers, highlight-to-read: And fair fucking play, I did not have the film turning into Flight Of The Phoenix on my bingo card. Rather than killing the all bad guys (because he's only killed several), Gerry decides he'd better repair his own plane and fly the rescued passengers all out of there. Because sure, he's ex-RAF so that means he's a fucking one-man ground crew. And sure, he could have performed this (apparently) five minute task at the start of Act II well before the militia showed up, when he had the time, the space and significantly fewer bullet holes in him, but let's not split hairs, eh? [/End]
Mind you, while I'm on: I'm assuming none of their mobiles work once they're on the main island after the crash? Because if that's mentioned in the script it's well buried among the screeching and complaining, and not a single character keeps forlornly jabbing at their Samsung that we see. And yet there, in the film's closing moments, is Gerry sitting on the back steps of the plane on the blower to his girl. How? This scene only takes place fifty miles away from the rest of the movie, there's either coverage in the Phillipines or there's not. Apart from anything else, all those militia bods are totally the type to be with 3 Mobile... [/End]
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