Every now and again there comes along a movie that not only insults your intelligence but slaps it in the face and then spits in its eye for good measure. Such a movie is Flightplan.

It’s not just the crater-sized plot-holes, or the loose ends that nobody bothered to tie up, or the far-fetched and convoluted premise that not even a dim-witted python could swallow. It’s that an intelligent actress like Jodie Foster would even bother with such a ridiculous script. The only reason I can think why she decided to helm this movie is that her maternal instinct got the better of her. As in Panic Room, the story revolves around a mother doing all she can to save her child.

In Flightplan, the mother is taking her 6-year-old daughter back to America following the unexplained death of her husband. All we’re told is that he ‘fell’. Neither mother nor child (the saddest-looking little girl) is coping well with the loss. At the beginning of the movie, we see them preparing to leave Berlin. Then we see them at the airport and the next thing we know, they’ve boarded the plane. Strangely enough, there are no flight attendants around when they take their seats as the first passengers on board. But soon the plane fills up with 400+ passengers and they’re off.

When Foster’s character wakes up from a 3-hour nap, her daughter’s nowhere in sight. The flight attendants turn out to be less than helpful (no surprises here), and Foster’s character becomes so wound up she starts hammering upon the pilot’s cabin door and attracting the attention of the Flight Marshal on board. An impassioned plea to the pilot results in a protocol-designated search of the aircraft, with the rest of the passengers confined to their seats, which makes Foster’s character very popular indeed.

Turns out Foster’s character is an aeroplane engineer and helped design the engines of the particular plane they’re flying in. She knows the plan of the aircraft inside out. When the preliminary search fails to turn up her little girl, she insists on going into the bowels of the plane to keep searching. But meanwhile, the crew has contacted the departure gate and it seems that there’s no record of the little girl ever boarding the plane. Her name’s not on the passenger manifest either. And no-one on board remembers seeing the child.

Is Foster’s character deluded? Is she a mad, grieving mother who’s lost both her husband and her child and is now losing her mind? Does the audience give a hoot?

Well, at first you do. You’re all involved, wondering if it’s a Twilight Zone-esque rendering of an urban legend, where a child goes missing in a crowded plane. It’s every mother’s nightmare. And then you start to doubt the mother’s sanity when everything points to the phantom child not having existed. So far, so good. Then, sadly, it all falls apart.

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Spoilers Alert: If you haven’t watched the movie, read no further, so that you can experience the joy of righteous indignation at your own convenience

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Suffice it to say that in order to enjoy this movie in its entirety, you have to believe in a sequence of increasingly unlikely events that strain credulity and defy logic.

§ Who has ever boarded an empty commercial plane? One without flight attendants standing there doing nothing but smirking at you?
§ No matter how self-effacing a little child can be, it’s unlikely that a fellow passenger (among 400 or so) or a flight attendant will fail to notice her. After all, don’t they make sure you buckle up at take-off? And there’re always two attendants to each aisle, not just one.
§ Even with the help of an accomplice, it is hard to believe that the bad guy can abduct the little girl and secrete her in the bowels of the plane without anyone being the wiser.
§ It is even more unbelievable that Foster’s character will, in a fit of madness, key in the code to open the casket. Who, except a truly mad person, would expect to find her child in there when the darn thing’s locked and could only open with a code that’s so complicated it’s darn right amazing that she, in her maddened/panicky state can still remember it?
§ And the darndest thing is that the whole plot hinges on this: that she will open that casket, because therein lies the Most Ridiculous Prop in all Christendom. Sure, it has to be hidden there, because the casket’s the only thing that’s not x-rayed, but does it really have to be a real detonator/bomb combo?
§ If the Marshal’s so convincing and the pilot is so stupid, why even have a real bomb? A fake one would do just as well.

The list could go on, but I’m worn out just thinking about the whole convoluted spiel. If the bad guys go to such lengths to target an aircraft engineer, kill her husband, abduct her child, and then sit back and wait for the mother to go stark raving loony mad, at least show (perhaps in flashback if they don’t want to give away the accomplice too early on) how her drink was doctored. Hey, but what if Foster’s character decided not to fly back to America or maybe fly on a different flight than the casket? Well, I guess the bad guys would just have to target someone else.

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End of Spoiler Alert

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Trust me, you don’t want to watch this movie. It will just make you mad. Mad at the scriptwriter for an insane premise, at the director for not even making an attempt to plug the plot-holes, at Jodie Foster for drawing you in and then betraying you with a dud. However, if you’re looking for action, you’ll get it. It’s not a boring movie, just infuriating. I’ve seen worse. Suspend all disbelief, put your brain on auto-pilot, and you may well end up enjoying Flightplan. Buckle up. You have been warned.


Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: None of the Above