Remember Jodie Foster in Panic Room? Me either. Not a problem though, seeing as how we have another opportunity to experience the same "woman in distress" theme with Flightplan.
Jodie Foster plays a mother, Kyle Pratt, who is travelling overseas with both her daughter and husband's dead body in tow, en route to the grandparents' place in America for the funeral. Her daughter is pretty whacked out, thanks to dead ol' dad, and spends most of her time acting like an ADHD child. Once on the plane, Kyle falls asleep and later wakes up to find that her daughter has mysteriously disappeared. Since this is a plot-driven movie with twists (yes, occasionally this kind of movie comes out), I won't go any further into the details. In short, Kyle has to figure out whether someone on the plane kidnapped her daughter, or if she ever brought her daughter on the plane in the first place. Overall it's an interesting premise, but it doesn't exactly deliver.
This movie isn't helped at all by the presence of Peter Sarsgaard, who plays Carson, an air marshal aboard the plane. I don't know where the casting people found this guy, but it couldn't have been far from a Grateful Dead concert. This actor either 1)spent the first 20 years of his life perpetually stoned, 2)has two lazy eyes and a lazy face to go with it, or 3)he has some disease that places him in a near-catatonic state similar to when you finish a frenzied bout of masturbation and it's hard to walk or talk afterward. Geez, someone touch this guy with a live wire. Or a bullet.
Even with an interesting premise, Flightplan still falls flat. The best thing about this movie is it'll make you come up with all sorts of theories to explain what the hell is going on. But, I'm willing to bet that when you finally see the light, you're going to be disappointed. In fact, I bet even the slowest reader could come up with a more satisfying ending than that which Hollywood provided.
Logic flaws also run amok in this movie, not the least of which involves the simple fact that a maniacal lady running around a plane screaming and pushing people in the post-9/11 era is a sure-fire way to indirectly convert herself into wormfood. The movie actually addresses this fact, yet it doesn't quite seem to hear itself. Maybe the script was written by several writers, with each subsequent writer taking over when the former lost interest and went to do something far more exciting, like blow his nose.
(Flightplan is rated PG-13 for subjecting moviegoers to 98 minutes of Jodie Foster's obnoxious bitch of a character) |
