Flight Plan

Imagine that you are sitting in a film production meeting, having recently read a great script for a movie about an airline crash. Your mind imagines the actors, sees the scenes of the film unfold, and then comes a moment of inspiration: let’s spend the first 20 minutes on the plane crash (the hook), and the rest of the film can explore the issue of the captain’s alcoholism. The end result is a dynamic opening scenario that captures the audience’s attention, but a really long, sometimes tedious, last 90 minutes.

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed the movie, but there are holes that should have been anticipated to enhance the cohesion of the storyline, as well as the development of the characters. Denzel Washington is outstanding as the captain who saves the lives of the souls on board, but he’s even better as an alcoholic who uses cocaine to “come down” from the booze so he can fly the plane. Everyone knows he’s an alcoholic, but no one confronts him – no matter how many planes filled with however many souls he is called to captain, which I find hard to believe. If a flight crew member smells alcohol reeking off the captain assigned to fly the plane, s/he would say something as the risk is too great for disaster to follow. No one would continue to turn a deaf ear and/or a blind eye and risk their own life, much less the lives of all the passengers and other crew, to fly in a metal canister 32,000 feet in the sky with a drunk behind the wheel.

Sure, this captain flies better drunk that some pilots may fly sober, but sooner or later, the drunk behind the wheel of the car crashes, often surviving an accident that kills the people in the car s/he hits, and the same is true for the pilot of a plane – and the crew and passengers who go down with it.

There is a line in the film that should have come earlier: Don’t tell me how to lie to cover up my alcoholism; I already know how to do that. The line could have been a great set-up prior to the actual plane crash, and if it were inserted at the opening of the film in a scene that set the scene for what would follow after the plane crash, events that form the last hour of the film would have been more cohesive. The ending feels as if the filmmakers spent their budget on the opening, then had to figure out how to finish the film on the cheap. A tack-on, if you will.

Am I glad I saw the film? Yes, but … you know, “the but it could have been better” we sometimes tack onto the end of a review, which means I liked it once, but I would not see it again.