Plane (2023)

Score: 1.5 / 5

Not all movies need to reach for complex themes or craft rich characters with dynamic developments. Sometimes they can just be fun, or thrilling, or cute. Plane is very much one of those that knows exactly what it is, and it perfectly fits its own bill. An action movie that doesn't try to be anything more than that -- and doing what it does fully capably -- can be a fabulous escapist experience for people, especially in the bleak midwinter. But, at least for me, Plane was dumb fun that never really got enjoyable and, rather, had me rolling my eyes so much in the cinema I got a headache.

Commercial pilot Brodie Torrance (Gerard Butler) is flying from Tokyo to Honolulu when his plane is struck by lighting in the South China Sea. There were some introductory scenes as the surprisingly few passengers boarded his plane, but none of that really matters, except that one (Mike Colter) is in handcuffs and escorted by a Canadian police officer. Torrance seems a bit too comfortable in his role as pilot, and makes groan-inducing jokes before taking off; his history in the Royal Air Force makes this kind of commercial work pretty snooze-worthy. So when they're stuck in a storm and lose power, his skills kick into unwanted high gear as they quickly descend. At the last possible moment, an island materializes out of the ocean and they crash in the jungle.

The sequence leading up to the crash is indeed thrilling, and made my own stomach do a few flip-flops. Filmed in mostly shaky, handheld, Paul Greengrass style, it features a few nasty moments of head trauma and screaming passengers guaranteed to make the audience grip their armrests. The crash is remarkably safe, thankfully, though by the time they evacuate the downed vehicle, a stewardess and the police officer are dead. Torrance and his co-pilot Samuel (Yoson An) determine that they're somewhere in the Philippines, and that the dirt road they found must lead somewhere. Torrance heads off into the jungle to seek help, taking the prisoner with him. Along the way, and after removing the cuffs, he learns that Louis Gaspare is a fugitive homicide suspect. The two actors don't have much chemistry, but the characters develop a tenuous camaraderie. It comes in handy when they encounter violent Filipino rebels who have taken over this particular island and intend to hold the survivors for ransom money before they are executed.

It's all quite pedestrian, apart from the initial fight scene between Torrance and the first bad guy who jumps him (shot in what appears to be an extended single take in tight quarters). Dispatching him, Torrance and Gaspare hurry back to the plane to discover the other passengers and Samuel have been taken hostage by other rebels. The two men go on a quest to rescue the hostages, get back to the plane, and hopefully island hop it to a safer location. It's all very '80s B-movie stuff, and that's okay for what it is. More than once I wanted the film to stop rushing through its sequences and try to develop a character or plot point more, or even to embrace its own wildness and really go balls-out, but it never does. It just keeps coasting through on its own contrived premise.

It really doesn't help that there's a whole subplot that constantly removes us from whatever tension the main story builds. Stateside, the airline headquarters notices the plane has gone missing and calls in a PR exec named Scarsdale (Tony Goldwyn in an utterly wasted role), whose swaggering gait tries to claim control over the situation. He calls in for military aid and is rebuffed, as the island (identified as Jolo) is hostile territory; he then summons mercenaries to rescue the endangered passengers. The back-and-forth is pretty distracting, but so are the scenes in headquarters themselves; dramatically staged in a dimly lit observation deck around a laughably large U-shaped table, it reads like a cheap mockery of military strategy films like Air Force One and its ilk (think White House Down or Olympus Has Fallen).

Things roll along quickly, and the hostages are almost immediately saved. A few bodies fall along the way, but eventually they all get back to the plane. When the angry rebels swarm the dirt road and open fire on the good guys, things get pretty ugly in a sort of laughable way. Various combatants pull out guns of increasing size as the characters devolve into brown-skinned baddies and (mostly) white-ish goodies. I hoped, during this sequence, for maybe some trite little redemptive arc for Gaspare, but the misanthropic screenplay doesn't even allow us that. Apart from a few diverting sequences -- handled fully capably, as in the best Butler- or Harrison Ford- or Liam Neeson-led action thrillers -- Plane is as dumb as its title suggests.