Flightplan

The character played by Jodie Foster in Flightplan is a nervous nellie, some would say an outright neurotic. What’s more alarming is what’s happened to Jodie Foster. You’ve got to hope it was clever make up that narrowed her nose into a chiselled peak, you’ve got to hope she hasn’t done a Michael

Jackson to herself (or maybe a Nicole Kidman?), and you’ve got to hope that the perky good looks and, more importantly, husky charm that has been with us since Freaky Friday haven’t gone away forever.

Okay, now we’ve got self interest out of the way – if you didn’t like Foster in Freaky Friday you are maybe not human – let’s get on with the movie, which is really only an average thriller telemovie, but managed to gross over $200 million in the cinemas, so what the heck do I know.

The story starts with Jodie and young daughter collecting a recently deceased dad and getting into the new state of the art mega jumbo plane in Germany, with the corpse down below in the hold travelling with them back to the States.

Before you can say boo, the young daughter has disappeared (just as well, she’s no young Jodie Foster) and Jodie has gone into total freak out mode.

The crew of course is generally uninterested, or suspicious, or downright hostile. No argument about credibility there – maybe the writers took a trip on Dixon’s new world Qantas or Jetstar, or maybe even British Airways (it’d take too long to list US companies with one star service).

The captain (Sean Bean) gets into the action, but not before Peter Sarsgaard has established himself as a presence as a security person who just happens to be working the same flight as Jodie. Of course it doesn’t take long for everybody to become convinced that Jodie is as mad as a cut snake, has imagined the child on board, and is so overwhelmed by grief she must be cuffed to the seat for the plane’s safety (but people who enjoy handcuffing scenes will be disappointed by the general lack of sexual and cult frissons you normally expect and get in a thriller).

Now here’s where talking about the plot gets tricky, since if you can’t see what’s coming, you must regularly get hit with haymakers on the chin and never see that right arm cross coming towards you. If you can’t pick the baddy the moment he appears, go to the back row of the lounge room cinema and put on the Dunce cap.

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o what’s left to describe. Well seeing how it’s a really big new state of the art plane, Jodie and the crew get to search every nook and cranny, high and low, and play chasies, and Jodie’s knowledge of the craft – she just happens to be a propulsion engineer – regularly comes into play when the crew try to tell her porkies.

Naturally she ends up down in the belly of the beast, and the coffin comes into play, and sinister plans – you might almost call it a criminal conspiracy – are eventually unveiled.

There’s a few fair average moments, and it passes the time well enough, popcorn style, but really it’s not the kind of exceptional effort you might have hoped for. Director Robert Schwentke flings the camera around like it’s going out of style – clearly he didn’t want to get locked down by filming all the plane interiors – and everybody emotes with conviction.

The handling of the extras isn’t all that convincing in wide scenes when they get caught up in Jodie’s search, and some double edged racism about a few Arab passengers falls with a clunk to the earth.

Foster is of course the main game, and she holds up her end, but the script is a clunky enough effort, especially when it comes to pay off time, which has a credibility gap as wide as the Grand Canyon (the story was written originally for a male lead, Sean Penn, and it shows, with the characterisation at an amorphous, catch all level that allows little depth for Foster, just hysteria and neurosis).

The main excitement seems to be the way the Art Department spent all its money on designing and building the futurist plane, but if anything it offers proof that film production designers should not be high on Boeings list for hire.

The exteriors look like a lot of fair average CGI’s and the interiors just look like a bigger version of a 747, so Jodie’s got more space to go hunting for the lost daughter. It’s all brought into play well enough, and there’s the usual loud noises and loud music to get you on the edge of the seat, but it’s never as scary as catching a real Qantas flight.

Bean is solid as the captain, while Sarsgaard manages the ineptly and unlikely scripting of the security officer with a kind of lazy intensity that works well enough. Kate Beahan also has her moments as the hostess from hell. Foster is carving out a niche in the thriller area as a woman in peril in her last few outings, but here’s a plea – enough already with the pinched nose thing, let’s have the old Jodie back, so we don’t have to get past the neurotic edge to relate to the heroine.

So yes professional enough, but with DVD as the best and cheapest way to catch up with it. On the big screen, at big screen prices, you might have felt stiffed; on the small screen, you can at least shout at the screen and argue about the plot without someone hitting you with a cabin meal from the seat behind.

The extras feature a couple of items about the building of the plane and the mainly interior shoot – after the build, it would have been a cheap studio based shoot with just a few exteriors in Germany – but again it’s a professional rather than an exciting offering.

All that said, the chosen demographic – presumably 20-40 year old women who care about missing kids and know all men are bastards – are still ahead of the game when you think of the poor ten year old boys forced to make do with Stealth for their current aircraft fix. It might also appeal to people who want all their worst fears about airline travel confirmed, and those who want to catch one time glamour girl Greta Scacchi in a curiously leaden two minute cameo as a therapist who totally fails to deal with Foster.

 

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