In the annals of history, there will be recorded a short list of movies so wretched and annoying that they scald the minds of those who watch them and leave them changed, broken, bereft of hope for the future. Flightplan is just such a film.
Flightplan seems to begin already on a down note. One could imagine the audience falling to sleep within the first three minutes, but that would mean they would miss out on every annoying and stupid plot twist.
Now, if you have any interest in ever seeing this movie, read no further. It's shit. When you watch it, you'll see that fact. Otherwise, I'm about to talk about the movie, "twists" and all.
I use quotation marks because nothing in the movie is really unexpected or surprising, except how low Jodie Foster has managed to sink.
The plot is simple and straightforward enough in its obvious future annoyance: a woman who helped design an improbably-gigantic plane attempts to fly her daughter and the body of her dead husband home; during the flight, the girl disappears; chaos ensues.
Now, to some, that might seem like an intriguing premise, though I don't think those people have seen very many movies.
Of course, the semi-crazed mother, still reeling from the loss of her husband to apparent suicide, freaks the fuck out and makes an ever-increasing scene.
It goes as badly as you would imagine and no one seems to remember seeing the girl at all, so the passengers and crew go through a series of disbelief, believing she's crazy, being annoyed, thinking there's a terrorist on board, and believing she's crazy again. (That just saved you about an hour right there.)
She confides in the air marshall that seems to want to help her, as the embittered captain obviously resents and doesn't believe her, despite the fact that she seems to know everything. An elaborate conspiracy manages to make her seem totally nuts and a report is given that her daughter died with her husband, attempting to make the audience question if she truly is crazy, though no one watching woudl believe that, as that would mean the movie was a complete waste of time. And this is only almost a complete waste of time...
So, as our crazy woman causes havoc, scares all the passengers, and fucks up the electrical system in an attempt to buy her time to find her daughter, she goes and cracks open her husband's coded and locked coffin in the hold.
Of course, the kind, relatively unsuspicious air marshall turns out to be the world's lamest criminal mastermind and he gets the duped captain to call in a wire transfer of $50 million dollars which gets the okey-dokey and speedy transfer that would never happen in real life.
We find that the coffin was full of explosives, which he snuck onto the plane, and, with the help of his stewardess friend, nabbed the little girl in a drink cart.
So we're to believe that our air marshall, who obviously has to have some sort of credentials, has thrown a man off a building to get a woman who knows about planes to fly the body home, so he can hide explosives in the casket and kidnap her daughter to send her into a freak-out that will get her to act crazy enough to draw suspicion to her and let the air marshall drum up a fear of her, on the off chance than he can get her to run all over the plane and finally crack open the coffin, allowing him access to the explosives, so he can rig the plane, get his money, blow up the woman and her child and escape without suspicion.
Rube Goldberg could not come up with a more stupid scenario for ransoming $50 million out of an airline.
The ending is, of course, assured and the woman gets her daughter and is cleared, though for some unknown reason she blows up the plane anyway, just to kill the man. Not that she couldn't have just pulled the detonators on the plastic explosives either.
The whole movie set the bar very high for understanding how any of it could possibly make sense.
Hitchcock's name has been tossed around in conjunction with the style and substance of the script. This could be true, assuming that your opinion of Hitchcock is that he's an incompetent asshole and his movies are built around people acting crazy and doing stupid shit. Then, maybe I could see the comparison.
Instead, I think they're just trying to claim some depth of intrigue that doesn't exist in this film. It's a matter of trying to pretend that somehow the paranoia and madness develops in a way that Hitchcock would approve of, but I think that would only be possible had he been born without a brain stem.
This movie is, all in all, a huge waste of time and I hope that no one has to watch it. Ever.
