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Flightplan (2005)
Director: Robert Schwentke
Movie review
From Time Out London
A little way into ‘Flightplan’s’ obvious (if unacknowledged) source, ‘The Lady Vanishes’ (1938), Michael Redgrave’s Gilbert cheerfully notes that ‘I’m about as popular as a dose of strychnine.’ He’s got nothing, however, on Jodie Foster’s Kyle, whose behaviour in hunting out the child she insists has disappeared in the middle of a transatlantic flight alienates not only flight crew and fellow passengers but, at least for a spell, the audience too.The sort of in-flight high-jinks that made heroes of the leads in ‘Passenger 57’ or ‘Air Force One’ are distinctly problematic post-9/11 – but it’s characteristic of Foster’s uningratiating persona that she’ll hammer at the cockpit door or jab a finger at an Arab-American if she thinks it necessary. As in ‘Panic Room’, she’s a kind of renegade lioness, a lone mother driven to feral defence of her daughter against a male threat, lips pursed in self-reliance, grief and humiliation stored and burned for fuel behind alert blue eyes. Peter Sarsgaard, as an over-patient air marshal, wisely declines to compete, offering jaded, heavy-lidded Malkovichisms instead.
Director Robert Schwentke proves adept at handling both the suspense of the set-up and the tension of the cat-and-mouse denouement. But having managed, à la ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, to suggest that Kyle is probably delusional because the alternative is demonstrably absurd, ‘Flightplan’ offers a turnabout so preposterous as to render its earlier mining of post-9/11 anxieties downright exploitative; it even rounds things off with a pornographic explosion or two. A waste, in the end, of Foster’s cool fire.
Author: BW
Time Out London Issue 1840: November 23-30 2005
Cast & crew
Director: Robert Schwentke
Producer: Brian Grazer
Cast: Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Sean Bean, Kate Beahan, Michael Irby, Assaf Cohen full cast
Rated: 15
Duration: 98 mins
UK Release: Nov 25 2005
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