Don’t Throw Baby From the Plane

As if the airline industry didn’t have enough problems. Several carriers are in bankruptcy, fuel costs are sky high, and now Hollywood is back on the warpath. Between last month’s terrorist-in-the-seat-next-to-you flick “Red Eye,” this week’s daughter-abduction-at-36,000-feet thriller “Flightplan,” and the “Lost” series treating viewers to regular flashbacks of an airliner splitting apart mid-flight, it’s almost as if someone in the travel industry forgot to pay Tinseltown its protection money. (“Nice little business you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if we had to resurrect the ‘Airport’ franchise.”)Like “Red Eye,” “Flightplan” practically begs to be called “Hitchcockian.” (If the former was “Strangers on a Plane,” the latter is “The Little Lady Vanishes.”) But whereas “Red Eye” at least half-deserved its comparison to the master of suspense, “Flightplan” comes nowhere close. Overwrought, exploitative, and unremittingly idiotic, it may in fact be the most disagreeable movie of the year.The film opens portentously (and pretentiously) in a dreary, wintertime Berlin. There has been a death, and it’s symbolized in all the usual ways: black ravens, departing trains, an open window that lets the chill air inside. The wife of the deceased, Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster), is not doing well. She hallucinates that her husband is still alive and imagines that strangers are spying on her and her 6-year-old daughter, Julia (Marlene Lawston).Fortunately, the two of them are departing the Teutonic gloom. As soon as the proper arrangements are made, they board a plane to accompany the coffin back to the United States. But not just any plane. This is a really, really big plane, with two entire decks of passengers. Moreover, Kyle, who is an engineer, helped design the plane’s engines and therefore knows every inch of the aeronautical behemoth, from avionics to cargo hold.This knowledge comes in handy when she awakens mid-flight to discover that Julia has disappeared. Kyle searches high and low for her daughter, enlisting the aid of the plane’s sardonic air marshal (Peter Sarsgaard) and stern captain (Sean Bean). But no one has seen Julia – indeed, no one can recall ever having seen her on the flight. She’s not listed on the plane’s manifest, and her boarding pass has vanished from her mother’s pocket.Kyle reacts to these developments with mounting alarm and paranoia, until a radio message from Berlin discloses that – wait for it, wait for it – Julia perished a week earlier in the same accident that claimed her father. In her grief, Kyle has simply lost her mind, imagining that her daughter is still alive.Except, of course, she’s done no such thing. The hysterical, delusional mother turns out to be right, and the air marshal, captain, passengers, crew, and everyday rules of logic and human behavior turn out to be wrong. Julia was abducted, there is a conspiracy, and it’s up to Kyle, armed with only motherly love and a mental blueprint of the plane, to foil it.The laughable storyline of “Flightplan” relies not just on the conceit that 400 passengers and several dozen crewmembers somehow avoided seeing Julia, but on the idea that villains would put into motion a vast, convoluted plot that required this to be the case. Yet stupidity is not the film’s worst trait. The sole level on which “Flightplan” connects, or even tries to connect, is that of visceral grief and anxiety. A dead spouse, a missing child – these are the only dramatic buttons the movie has, so it pushes them again and again and again. There’s something unsavory about this kind of “entertainment,” which plays as little more than emotional pornography.Saddest of all, though, is what “Flightplan” suggests about Jodie Foster’s career. Ms. Foster has never worn stardom lightly, but the strain is truly beginning to show. Her performance isn’t bad per se, but it is clenched tighter than a fist. There’s no joy or life in it, only endurance, as if the film is as much a trial for her as it is for her character.This is Ms. Foster’s second consecutive starring role (the previous was in “Panic Room”) in which she plays a single mother driven to desperate, savage extremes to keep bad guys from killing her child. Even her bit part in last year’s “A Very Long Engagement,” while giving her an opportunity to show off her French, offered her little chance to display emotions other than anguish and regret. It would be nice to see those brilliant blue eyes again when they’re not red from tears.

Don’t Throw Baby From the Plane

Don’t Throw Baby From the Plane

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