The new year’s first action-oriented release is one helluva ride.
Gerard Butler has been ill-served by some of his recent thrillers, the low point being 2016’s London Has Fallen. Happily, director Jean-François Richet’s high-octane roller coaster is a lean and mean cut above, thanks in great part to Charles Cumming and J.P. Davis’ sharply crafted script.
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| Having just realized that they've crash-landed on a remote island ruled by murderous extremists, commercial pilot Brodie Torrance (Gerard Butler, left) and mysterious companion Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter) check out the opposition ... which is overwhelming. |
Sacramento’s sold-out Tuesday evening preview audience — full houses being a rare sight, these days — applauded as the end credits began to roll.
No surprise.
Events begin during final pre-flight check at the Singapore terminal of Trailblazer Airlines, a low-budget carrier taking off for Tokyo, and then Hawaii, under the command of Captain Brodie Torrance (Butler, his Scottish accent in full glory) and co-pilot Samuel Dele (Yoson An). It’s a quiet New Year’s Eve flight, with only 14 passengers … until the last minute arrival of a shackled Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter, well remembered as TV’s Luke Cage), being shepherded to the States by an FBI handler.
They sit in the far rear.
Torrance is dismayed when a Trailblazer bean-counter insists that he pilot through a storm en route to Tokyo, rather than take a slightly longer route around it, in order to save a modest amount of fuel. But he’s a company man, and does as instructed.
But all hell breaks loose when they hit the storm.
The subsequent 15 minutes are apt to put you off flying for good: a terrifying, persuasive depiction of helpless passengers buffeted and tossed about after the plane is crippled by a lightning strike. (Well … persuasive during all interior shots, anyway; the exterior model and/or CGI shots leave something to be desired.)
The white-knuckle anxiety is enhanced by the deftly sketched relationships that have developed between the veteran Torrance and younger Dele, and head flight attendant Bonnie (Daniella Pineda). A few passengers also stand out: boorish, entitled businessman Sinclair (Oliver Trevena, immediately loathsome); the mildly confrontational Carver (Oliver Trevena); and giggly, under-dressed social media influencers Katie (Kelly Gale) and Brie (Lilly Krug).
Thanks to skill and dollops of luck, Torrance manages a miraculous landing on a stretch of road somewhere within one of the Philippines' many island clusters. The crew and passengers don’t actually know this yet, since the plane’s avionics were fried, and there’s no cell service. (Constant Companion sagely wondered why commercial flight crews wouldn’t be equipped with satellite phones, but that would have ruined this story’s suspense.)
Meanwhile, back at Trailblazer HQ, owner Terry Hampton (Paul Ben-Victor) and his senior executives work the unfolding crisis — a missing plane, possibly at the bottom of the ocean — accompanied by unconventional troubleshooter Scarsdale (Tony Goldwyn).
It’s totally refreshing to see that Ben-Victor does not make Hampton some sort of corporate weenie looking to save his own ass; he’s genuinely invested in whatever means are necessary to (hopefully) locate and (even less likely) recover the plane and its passengers and crew.
Goldwyn is totally enjoyable as the don’t-mess-with-me Scarsdale, particularly when — in one of the world’s worst cases of out of the frying pan, and into the fire — best-guess map plotting likely puts the plane on Jolo Island: a haven of pirates and religious extremists far beyond the control of the Philippine government.
Scarsdale wastes no time scrambling a team of his favorite search-and-rescue mercenaries, headed by the resourceful Shellback (Remi Adeleke, looking every inch the Navy SEAL of his former career).
Meanwhile, the plane’s presence has been detected by Datu Junmar (Evan Dane Taylor), the ruthless leader of a murderous band of pirates well versed in holding kidnapped hostages for ransom … and then killing them anyway. The baddies establish their brutality during a shocking few seconds, although Torrance isn’t around to witness this; he has briefly left to seek a building he noticed during the landing, hoping for some means of contacting the outer world.
He’s joined by Gaspare: reluctantly trusted because, well, he looks like he could bend steel bars with his bare hands. But he isn’t mere brawn; Colter has just as much presence as Butler, and the two are sublime as reluctant allies.
(Class, raise your hands if you knew that the heavily muscled Colter would make an excellent good/bad guy.)
Films of this nature live or die on the basis of a) having established likable characters and a thoroughly credible menace; with b) impossible odds for survival; and — most important — c) plenty of thoroughly satisfying third-act payback and whup-ass.
Richet, his writers and editor David Rosenbloom definitely deliver; the final half-hour is a terrific blend of action, suspense, dark humor — patrons murmured in delight, when Gaspare picked up a massive sledge hammer — and engaging character dynamics.
Plane — one of the worst movie titles ever, just in passing — may be a vicarious guilty pleasure, but it gets the job done in style.
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