Flightplan

26 March 2006
DVD rental

This was OKish, verging on a bit weak.

Jodie Foster plays a woman who is flying her dead husband from Germany to the US is an aircraft she helped to design. Her daughter goes missing on the plane. We learn early on that Peter Saarsgard’s character is the plane’s air marshall; his acting says “Bad Guy”, which doesn’t exactly make for much suspense.

While the film is supposed to be a suspense/thriller, its cinematography and direction are informed by supernatural horror movies, so the effect runs contrary to the film’s aims and is just a bit weird (though there is some justification in the implication that the daughter died alongside the husband).

Spoiler Warning

The film isn’t as clever as I thought it would be: I thought that the kidnapping of the daughter was designed to allow hijackers to determine the identity of the air marshall, but in the end the air marshall is trying to pin a hijacking on Jodie Foster’s character. When you analyse what he’d have had to do to achieve this, the film seems incredibly contrived.