Flightplan

The most implausible plot I have seen in a long time - and that includes Sci-Fi. Flightplan is a Jodie Foster vehicle, which is not normally a bad thing for a film to aspire to, but they usually at least have a decent plot line. It should be noted that the previous Foster effort I reviewed - Inside Man - was stronger in plot but still provided a fairly thin Foster character.

The plot: Kyle Pratt (Foster) is travelling home to the US with her daughter after her husband mysterious dies by falling from the roof of their apartment building (suicide is implied). Kyle is some sort of aircraft engineer, specialising in the engines, but works for an incredibly stingy company (they stick her in economy class). She boards the newest passenger megajumbojet - an A474 (think Airbus A380 but bigger) - for the trip home. It's a plane so big your child could get lost.

Needless to say she goes to sleep and wakes up to find that her daughter is missing. What follows is a frantic search of the plane, but nobody on board remembers seeing her daughter. Most of the film is taken up by her search for her daughter - despite Captain Rich (Sean Bean) and crew coming to the conclusion that the little girl never boarded in the first place because she died with her father.

There's also Peter Sarsgard's air marshal, who seems to be good-hearted and trying to help her.

The plot line suffers from a few gaping credibility gaps - why isn't she in business class? Why does this major company for which she is apparently an important engineer shove her in economy class on the flight home to bury her husband? Why does nobody think to ask why, if the little girl died with her father, there is only one coffin in the plane's cargo hold? Did she leave the girl's body behind because there was only enough money for the economy ticket and one coffin? How on earth could the bad guy think that he could get away with a scheme that relied on so many things going perfectly - like Kyle not waking up while her daughter was being kidnapped right next to her?

The above points are not mere quibbles - they are serious deficiencies in the plot line of a film that should be a serious thriller.

In summary: If you can get over the plot flaws, and I mostly did because I like Foster, this is a fairly good thriller.

It has all the Hollywood touches, including the contemporary one of the Arab wrongly accused of being a terrorist/bad guy - this was ok and served a bit as a plot device, but they did go overboard when a redneck attacked him mid-flight and even moreso at the conclusion of the film where he's the only one to see and pick up her bag or something and hand it to her.

The Casablanca connection: Nothing in the plot or characters of this film reminds me of Casablanca. The only thing I can say is that for a film that was years in development, Flightplan had more holes in it than Casablanca, which was written on the fly and the ending revised the night before it was shot.

The rating: 6 out of 10. One of the promos I read about this film was that it was an 'Hitchcockian thriller'. That's an insult to the great director. My advice for watching this one is to turn any scepticism regarding the plot line off - just accept what the nice director tells you, focus on Foster's piercing blue eyes and go along for the ride. You won't end up anywhere special, but there will be some action and views during the flight.