Plane: A suspenseful flight

Plane (2023) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity and considerable violence

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

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.

 

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.

Their edge-of-the-seat storyline beings with a nail-biting first act, detours into an unexpectedly scary second act, and then pulls out all the stops for an exciting, crowd-pleasing finale. The package also gets plenty of pizzazz from Butler’s charismatic presence and hard-charging grit.

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.)

Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom — 'Sauring' adventure

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for relentless action violence and all manner of dino rage
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.22.18

This film is a cautionary tale that hearkens back to the immortal line from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, which has been paraphrased — in movies, TV shows and other books — many times since:

With a particularly nasty Indoraptor loose in her family's private Cretaceous museum,
young Maisie (Isabella Sermon, far right) hopes that Owen (Chris Pratt) and
Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) can keep her alive.

“Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge.”

Its function as a klaxon-blaring environmental warning aside, this fifth installment in the Jurassic series also is a rip-snortin’ rollercoaster ride. Director J.A. Bayona and editor Bernat Vilaplana maintain an impressive level of intense, edge-of-the-seat suspense for two full hours. Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow’s script is cleverly structured into three distinct acts, each laden with distinct goals, challenges and dangerous pitfalls.

At the same time, a thoroughly unsettling message percolates beneath the surface, until finally blossoming — nay, exploding — during the climax.

That’s a problem. The care with which Connolly and Trevorrow have built their plot suddenly sags beneath the weight of too much extraneous exposition during the final 15 minutes: one genuine surprise, a failure to resolve, and a lingering catastrophe that has been foretold by Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm (and it’s very nice to see him again).

We’re left with enough open-ended material to fuel two or three more films ... which, frankly, is quite irritating.

Up to that point, however, Fallen Kingdom is a lot of fun, in great part because Bayona, Connolly and Trevorrow wisely follow — and often reference — many of the ingredients that made Steven Spielberg’s 1993 handling of Michael Crichton’s original novel so thoroughly absorbing.

Stalwart heroes: check. Well-meaning scientists with their ideals shattered: check. Greedy corporate villains: check. One (and only one) comic-relief character: check. A child in peril: check.

Plenty of unexpected jump-attacks by swiftly moving dinosaurs: Check-check-check.