>> FLIGHTPLAN
DRAMA AT 37,000 FEET
fancies a heady dose of paranoia fused with a potent shot of action and a sprinkling of violence? If this sounds like your mix, then Robert Schwenke’s thriller will definitely hit the spot. With Flightplan, Hollywood continues to play with the trend of exploiting our fear of transport, but this time takes it to the skies.
The story follows Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) and her daughter Julia’s flight home to New York from Berlin. But, at 37 000 feet, Julia mysteriously vanishes without a trace. Already struggling with the recent death of her husband, Pratt’s emotional sensibilities are truly catapulted sky high when she cannot find Julia and learns that there is no record of her ever having been on the flight. Other passengers fail to recall ever seeing her, but Pratt remains frantically convinced that she has been taken. I don’t know about you, but I feel the biting itch of a conspiracy theory being unleashed…
As the plot unfolds, Pratt ropes the entire state-of-the-art plane’s crew into searching every nook and cranny for her daughter. Sympathy soon fades into disbelief as paranoid tension floods the cabin and Pratt is forced to take control. She runs amok, tearing through the plane (that she, of course, designed herself) to search for Julia, with some quite startling results.
If this all sounds a bit overwhelming, there’s the eye candy aspect to savour that will surely sweeten the mix for you, which is provided by the fine form of Foster herself, whose usual attraction remains (for me, at least) despite her desperate and potentially insane on-board antics. Sean Bean is captain Rich, whose involvement is spiced with a questioning ambiguity in this who-to-believe drama, looking ‘andsome (as my, or your, Gran would say) in uniform with authoritative appeal (although, for me, that rough-and-tumble Boromir getup still can’t be beaten).
As doubt, distrust and general mayhem circulate with more substance than the in-flight meals, you’ll be hooked and drawn in as Academy Award-winning producer Brian Grazer’s unsuspecting film prey. With danger lurking large and action aplenty, seat edges will be worn and appetites fed by Flightplan, leaving you nothing short of entertained, with probable resonances of empathic emotional trauma to boot!
Hannah May