You shouldn’t waste time on this movie, but you might be tempted to! It stars Gerard Butler, who won hearts and minds as Leonidas in 300, and Mike Coulter, who won hearts and minds as Luke Cage and Spartan Locke. I wanted to like this one. I hoped it might have the folksy charm of Butler’s outings like Gamer, but there’s no charm here.
It all starts fairly badly; it’s clear the scriptwriters googled, “How do planes work?” and then used the top hit from a conspiracy site where the Earth is flat. Then they stacked on the usual Trifecta of Impossibility™—the plane without enough fuel, the convict transport, the storm of ages—and hoped we wouldn’t look too hard when our first double fatality happened during turbulence.
To call this a masterpiece of airline realism would be a stretch.
Imbeciles Unite
Every character in this movie, aside from Butler’s Brodie Torrance and Colter’s Louis Gaspare, is either an imbecile or an asshole. Our copilot appears to be someone who’s never flown before. Our cabin crew is staffed by people who don’t know about the life-saving benefits of safety belts. And any time there is a white man with a bald head, you can be guaranteed he is going to yahoo his way right into a podium finish for Biggest Dickhead. There is a particular duo of chrome domes who are doing their best to redefine the power combo of incompetence and arrogance.
When the terrorists arrive, despite being warned that the island is dangerous, these smooth brains run straight into being captured. None of them should be allowed to use a swimming pool unsupervised.
The only upshot if this were real is that it would provide plenty of material for a new safety video. In case of emergency, blame the nearest idiot.
The Villains
We clearly can’t have a terrorist movie without terrorists, but the world remains a confusing place. Our scriptwriters were possibly nervous about using Nazis or Russians, and who can blame them in the current political climate.
So, they chose Filipinos. They managed to find one who’d been on the protein, and got this poor chump to overact the most one-dimensional sociopath to grace the screen. The real problem isn’t that he’s not believable; it’s that his character is criminally negligent to the point where it’s difficult to imagine him managing his own dry cleaning, let alone a separatist army.
See, he’s not new to the terror game. He’s captured various chuckleheads before—the same type who are too stupid or lame to run away—and just kind of zeroed them. This is not a great way to fund your rebellion; you need money, not corpses. Rather than learn from his earlier mistakes (something we might expect from a Rhesus monkey), he doubles down on the hostage-killing stakes.
So, What?
Plane isn’t just a bad movie. It’s an airborne embarrassment, coasting on Gerard Butler’s chin and Mike Colter’s charisma while everything else crashes in slow motion behind them. It’s a film so dumb, so spectacularly hollow, that it makes you nostalgic for the directorial stylings of Uwe Boll. And not ironically. At least Boll’s films had commitment. This one just had turbulence.
It’s a let-down for people hoping to see Leonidas kick another fool into a pit or for Coulter to try on that Sweet Christmas charm. It feels like what happened if Airplane! got rewritten by someone who’d just rage-watched Taken 3 and spilled their feelings into Final Draft. Plane isn’t a movie; it’s a cry for help in screenplay form.
Thanks for flying with us through this disasterpiece. Keep your seatbelts fastened for the next review, and if you didn’t die from the astounding stupidity of your cabin crew, please press like and subscribe before grabbing your bags from carousel four.
If this review made you laugh, sigh, or reconsider watching anything involving bald men and bad decisions, you can fuel my caffeine-powered hot takes over on Ko-fi:
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