Flightplan (23 September 2005)
directed by Robert Schwentke
starring Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Kate Beahan, Erika Christensen, Jana Kolesarova, Marlene Lawston, Sean Bean, Greta Scacchi, Michael Irby, Assaf Cohen, Forrest Landis
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MPAA rating: Studio: Touchstone Pictures, Imagine Entertainment Script: Peter A. Dowling, Billy Ray Music: James Horner Running time: 98 minutes Tags: airplanes; Drama; explosions; Mystery; Thriller Tactical strength: [5/10]
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for violence and some intense plot material
Essentially, Flightplan recreates Jodie Foster's character in Panic Room but puts her in a much bigger room (a jumbo jet) and with a bigger cast. Foster plays Kyle Pratt, a recently widowed woman taking her husband's body back to the United States. She boards the plane with her daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston), and they move to the rear of the plane to stretch out for a nap. Waking up about three hours later, Kyle cannot find Julia. When she alerts the crew, at first they cooperate with the search, but eventually the crew stops searching when the passenger manifest says that Julia never boarded the plane. Foster switches her acting from concerned and intense to very concerned and intense. She doesn't accept the captain's explanation that her daughter didn't board the plane, and the sky marshal, Carson (Peter Sarsgaard), takes her into custody.
Just before boarding, Kyle explained to Julia that mommy works on the plane engines as a propulsion engineer. Her career supposedly gives her such intimate knowledge that she knows the location of all the little hatches out of the cabin to the infrastructure of the plane. She even knows exactly which relay to short out to drop the oxygen masks in the cabin. I'm sure Kyle spent a lot of time with the structural plans of the airplane, but for propulsion, she would essentially know all the stress and strain points on the aircraft, but I doubt she would have intimate knowledge of the entire floor plan let alone the remote hatches and access ways. So when Kyle escapes from Carson (several times) and starts moving about the infrastructure of the plane, my suspension of disbelief gets totally blown out of the sky. Also, Carson keeps putting Kyle back in the passenger cabin, when clearly she poses a threat to the passengers. Why not lock her up in a galley or other area not accessible or visible to passengers?
In spite of the short running time, we get about four loops of the same action. Kyle runs about the plane looking for he daughter, creates a ruckus, Carson apprehends her, and he escorts her back to her seat. The stakes never really escalate from one loop to the next, but Foster escalates her level of agitation continually. At the very end, we do have a life-or-death situation, but I thought "finally" rather than "will she manage to escape." As the film winds down, we have some pretty unbelievable NTSB and FBI procedures. For one, the plane lands in Newfoundland, so why do US agencies show up on the scene? And these agencies seem much to ready to let Kyle just walk away.
I didn't find much difference in Jodie foster's portrayal of Kyle than in her portrayal of Meg Altman in Panic Room, and I found Forest Whitaker a much more convincing nemesis than Peter Sarsgaard. I think Sean Bean, who played the captain, would have made a much for effective sky marshal, and he has proved his ability for nasty characters in movies such as Patriot Games, the Lord of the Rings series, and Troy. Flightplan has a ho-hum script that wants to simultaneously work as a psychological thriller and an in-air terror film. I never really believed that real peril existed on the airplane, although I did fall for the implication that Kyle might have completely imagined her daughter. Foster plays her part well, but the situation doesn't give her much depth in which to work.
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