After seeing Tony Goldwyn in several authoritative roles, I’ve come to the conclusion that he should be running for President of the United States in real life. I mean, he played Fitzgerald Grant, the President of the United States, in Scandal for seven seasons. Then in Plane he plays a crisis manager who gets shit done. So why the hell not? At least he’s got some relevant experience. Tony Goldwyn for President!
In Plane, Captain Brodie Torrance (Gerard Butler) is a former Royal Air Force pilot turned commercial pilot navigating a routine flight from Singapore to Honolulu. The plane’s manifest consists of 14 passengers, one of which is a prisoner, Louis Gaspare (Luke Cage himself, Mike Colter), accused of homicide. Running into a severe storm mid flight, lightning strikes the plane and forces an emergency landing on the first piece of land Cap. Brodie can find, which happens to be an island in the Philippines ravaged by conflict.
Scarsdale (Tony Goldwyn), the crisis manager for the airline, immediately springs into action by calling on a group of mercenaries to go in and rescue them since the real “authorities” won’t step foot on the island. Meanwhile, Captain Brodie and Louis find themselves in charge of the passengers and trying to protect them from the Rebels of Jolo island, lead by Datu (Evan Dane Taylor) while waiting for rescue.
The first thing you’ll want to do before watching Plane is manage those expectations. My expectations were apparently too high. They were higher than the snow on the tallest mountain, higher than the beams of sunshine tickling the Earth, higher than the people in the parking lot of a Phish concert. Gerard Butler is a known action-movie ass-kicker, so I thought we might get another terrific entry in the “Die Hard on a…” series with “Die Hard on a Plane, Then an Island.”
But nope! My expectations were shot deader than a double-dead shot-through-the-head zombie. My expectations needed to be down in the graveyard with those zombies, where it’s damp and yucky, and I might’ve been pleasantly surprised.
Captain Brodie primarily manages the plane action- the emergency landing, the all-or-nothing takeoff in the final act, etc. It’s a little disappointing not seeing him kick a baddie into a crater to hell and yell, “This is TSA Regulation!” Instead, most of the disposing of bad guys is left up to Louis and the merc team.
The highlight of the action is definitely when the mercenaries show up and they have a final showdown with the Rebels while Captain Brodie is trying to get the plane in working order to take off. The mercenaries set up a Barrett M82 gun and holy shit! I was having Rambo (IV) finale flashbacks. That thing shoots through trucks like Jell-o and sends the baddies flying with such power they’d probably have launched into orbit if not for the aforementioned Jell-o truck.
The other characters in the film, the passengers, make no difference on anything. They don’t impact the story, they’re not funny or cool, they’re just there to try to up the tension during the many points where the plane is close to crashing. Honestly, I would have been more invested if the plane were full of puppies or kittens. We don’t really get to know any of the passengers except Louis, sort of. When Datu and the Rebels kill a passenger, the brutality is notable even if you spend ⅓ of a second grieving the passenger. The passengers are like grass- always there, always visible, but you don’t really concern yourself with whether grass gets shot in the head.
In the end, Plane travels from point A to point B with some serviceable tension and action. It neither bores nor thrills. You could do better, and you could definitely do worse.
Time Until Action: ~14 minutes until the Plane hits bad weather
Action Rating: 3 exploding tray tables in their upright position, out of 5
This is the Action Flick Chick, and you’ve just been kicked in the ass!
Disclaimer: Just because I am the Action Flick Chick and love action movies does not mean I condone real life violence in any way. Everyone has their own shit to deal with, be nice to each other.
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