Overall Rating
  Awesome: 4.5%
Worth A Look: 36.04%
Average: 19.82%
Pretty Bad: 17.12%
Total Crap: 22.52%
9 reviews, 57 user ratings
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| Flightplan |
by U.J. Lessing
"The plot is getting thicker (and Leon’s getting laaaaarrrrger!)"
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The weight of Flightplan rests entirely on Jodie Foster’s shoulders. She’s practically in every shot. Unfortunately, Foster isn’t simply heaving a substandard thriller on her poor back. She’s also attempting to lift a terrible script, one-note direction, and a ton of clichéd scenes. To top it all off, Foster’s participation in the ludicrous third act, to continue my metaphor, may be just as damaging as a senior citizen lifting barbells from the waist, and may cause Foster to fire her chiroprac… oops…her agent.Her attraction to this project is not surprising though. Jodi Foster is more prone to fads than an eleven-year-old at Toys-R-Us. She began her career as a lovable tom-boy actor, played a sluttish Lolita-type in the 70s, turned to portraying career-minded women passed over because of their gender in the late 80s and early 90s, and has now moved comfortably into a series of movies about shell-shocked mothers protecting their children.
Foster plays Kyle, an airplane engineer who has a rough time after her husband “accidentally” topples off the roof of their home in Germany. Was it a suicide? Was it an accident? Was he intentionally reducing his role to cameo status? Foster just doesn’t know.
Her husband’s passing doesn’t stop Kyle from taking long nighttime walks with him in the snow. Perhaps these delusional or phantasmagoric episodes are why Foster decides to take her doe-like daughter, Julia, and move back to America to start anew.
Foster and her daughter travel via an airplane the size of Berlin (and with more bathrooms too.) There are lounges, bars, multiple levels, secret panels, luggage compartments, baggage hold (complete with a brand new car within), a cockpit and flat screen televisions everywhere.
Once aboard, Kyle and her daughter fall asleep. When Kyle wakes, her greatest CNN-induced nightmare has been realized—her pretty white child has disappeared, and apparently none of the other passengers remembers her. Is her daughter real, or another delusion?
As realization and doubt creep into Kyle’s subconscious, she storms through the plane with the determination of General Macarthur and a battle cry of, “Where’s my daughter? Where’s my daughter? Where’s my daughter? Where’s my daughter?”
She does get limited help from Captain Boromir, son of Denathor (Sean Bean unsuccessfully attempting to shed typecasting) and a mellow air marshal, Peter Sarsgaard. However, they offer minimal help and maximum doubt.
In the end, Kyle must take charge by forcefully searching every nook and cranny of the plane through sneakiness and sabotage. In this post 9/11 era, I found it perturbing that engineers would place crucial hardware in a crawl space easily accessible from the bathroom.
This is a one-note film, where every scene carries the exact amount of tension and pacing as the previous one. There is no variety, and if one were to shuffle the scenes around in a random order, Flightplan would feel exactly the same.The film ends with Foster learning that the conniving pilot kidnapped her daughter in an attempt to sell her to a German child slave labor ring. In all seriousness, I made that up, and I don’t want to spoil the ending for you. However, my invented ending accurately simulates the sense of bewilderment you will experience when Flightplan finally reveals its conclusion.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=13113&reviewer=396
originally posted: 09/27/05 12:33:49
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USA
23-Sep-2005 (PG-13)
DVD: 24-Jan-2006
UK
N/A
Australia
10-Nov-2005
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