Cast
Jodie Foster (Kyle Pratt)
Peter Sarsgaard (Carson)
Sean Bean (Captain Rich)
Kate Beahan (Stephanie)
Erika Christensen (Fiona)
Greta Scacchi (Therapist)
Marlene Lawston (Julia Pratt)

Flightplan has the misfortune of arriving in theaters less than two months after Wes Craven’s enjoyable Red Eye already mined the airplane thriller concept. It also has the misfortune of not being very good. The second count is enough to convict it, but standing in the shadow of a fun flick like Red Eye sends Flightplan to the slammer without chance of parole.

The two films actually have substantially different plotlines away from their identical settings. Flightplan is an “annihilation mystery,” a plot device that author Cornell Woolrich used many times in his classic novels and short stories, most famously in Phantom Lady. Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes and the Dutch film The Vanishing are probably the best known examples of this gimmick on screen, where a person seems to disappear into nowhere and everyone except one or two people remember their existence at all. The Forgotten last year took this concept into the science-fiction extreme. Flightplan pulls off its disappearing act quite literally in mid-air. Kyle Pratt’s (Jodie Foster) daughter Julia suddenly vanishes from an E-474 plane crossing the Atlantic. Kyle starts raising a panicky fuss onboard, while the much put-upon captain (Sean Bean) and crew try to calm her down and convince that she never brought a girl onboard with her.

If the movie wanted to go for a daring look into the annihilation concept, it would have played heavily on the possibility that Kyle is suffering from delusional paranoia in the wake of the suicide of her husband and death of her daughter. However, the script doesn’t have the guts to run with this “is-she or isn’t-she crazy” idea. We’re placed too much on Kyle’s side and asked to see the crew and passengers as insensitive jerks who just don’t understand her desperate need to find her missing kid. Actually, Kyle’s mania poses a serious danger to everyone on board, and you start wishing someone would just sedate her and let it go at that. Peter Sarsgaard, the air marshal who takes charge of her when she begins banging her way around the plane and threatening Arabs, says the film’s best and most damning line when he tells Kyle: “Your husband’s suicide is starting to make more sense. I’ve only known you for a few hours and already I want to jump.” The script can’t take all the credit for making Kyle Pratt an unlikable pest; Foster’s performance generates no sympathy for her. The love she should feel for her daughter just never comes through, which makes her panicky fits sound like a grouchy woman just letting everybody else around her have it because she’s having a rotten day.

The rest of the actors do not help much, especially Peter Sarsgaard, who seems constantly on the verge of falling asleep. The casting of the small parts and the extras is also surprisingly poor. Their reactions to Kyle’s antics simply ring false, and the looped voices of their chatter sound like community theater actors reading from cue cards. Sean Bean is the only real trooper in the cast, getting more sympathy for his plight than Jodie Foster does for hers.

Director Robert Schwentke seems to have no idea how to make the setting claustrophobic and fearful, something that Wes Craven pulled off wonderfully in Red Eye. The E-474 double-decker luxury plane starts feeling like a cruise ship with endless passages and open spaces for the characters to wander through. In the cabin, the camera and the passengers seem to have unlimited freedom of movement. Anybody who has ever been on a plane knows that they simply do not feel like this. The biggest jumbo jet in the world still has a cramped, stuffy coach class. Schwentke exploits none of the suspenseful possibilities of the limited location, and he hardly works in the most potent fear-tactic of air travel, turbulence. Red Eye bounces and jostles so often it almost makes you air-sick, but Foster and company have such smooth flying that you would almost expect to look out the plane window and find that they were still sitting on the ground at the terminal!

Schwentke also doesn’t have a good grasp of the building of suspense. The movie crawls along for an hour with the same set of scenes repeating over and over again before a key revelation finally pushes it along. The trailer for the film stupidly spoiled this moment, so the first hour is just marking time for anybody who has seen a preview for it. (More and more films are doing this now. Do directors simply no longer care that studio publicity departments are giving away their plot twists?) The later unveiling of what happened to Kyle’s daughter is outrageous and depends on logic so punched full of holes that the studio could market it as a Whiffle ball. Plenty of films have overcome outlandish twists with a combination of momentum and empathetic characters, but since this film has neither of those things to start with, the finale collapses into absurdity. Boring absurdity.

The final irony of Flightplan is that although it lasts only an hour and a half—the same running time as Red Eye—it feels like it runs twice that length. It’s so sluggish that it leaves you with the feeling of lounging around in an airport while waiting for a delayed flight.

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