The Doctor’s Diagnosis: B-
Rarely does a film’s title so succinctly summarize the scope of its ambition. For the sake of puns, I was hoping that this movie would be just plain bad. Or just plain good, but I wasn’t really banking on that one. It turns out that Plane is on the better side of mediocre and “just plain decent” just doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. This is a generic action movie, no more and no less, and while it doesn’t do anything new or even particularly well, it doesn’t do anything particularly poorly either. It is, well, decent. It’s the kind of movie that I won’t remember come December and when I’m looking over the list of movies I went to see in 2023, I will think “what the hell is Plane?….oh right, that was okay.”
Gerard Butler stars as Brodie, a commercial pilot that used to serve in the Royal Air Force. Brodie is flying a plane from Singapore to Honolulu on New Year’s Eve and is instructed to fly through a storm in order to save fuel. Shockingly, that’s a bad idea and the plane is struck by lightning, forcing an emergency landing on an island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Unfortunately, the island is controlled by generic rebel forces that are embroiled in some nondescript conflict and they don’t take kindly to the plane’s passengers on their turf. Brodie, aided by a convicted killer named Louis that was being transported to prison on the flight, must fight off the rebels and figure out how to get the passengers off the island.
If you have seen any action movies from the 90s, Plane won’t exactly be loaded with surprises. In fact, it feels like the script has been sitting on the shelf since 1995 and was only modernized to the extent that the characters use cell phones. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was originally written as Under Siege 3: Dark Skies or Con Air 2: Turbulence or some such thing. We’ve got the reluctant hero with the military/law enforcement past, we’ve got the boardroom filled with generic guys in suits that are monitoring the situation, we’ve got the convict that’s actually a good guy, we’ve got generic bad guys with a vague political agenda that’s never really addressed. If I watched this with a can of Surge and a plate of extreme beef nacho Bagel Bites, I might think it was 1996 all over again. And that aint such a bad thing.
A quick digression: Does anyone else remember extreme beef nacho Bagel Bites? They were topped with ground beef, nacho cheese and peppers. I fucking loved those things. I think I had them everyday after school for a year in either sixth or seventh grade and then they just disappeared from store shelves. It was one of the saddest days of my life.
Anyway, back to Plane. Unexpectedly, the most effective sequences occur before it even becomes an action movie. The sequences on the plane, and the subsequent crash, are surprisingly intense and lend themselves more to a disaster film than a generic action movie. It’s a rather long preamble to the main plot, as I was checking my watch not out of boredom, but more so out of confusion. This section of the film is very well done, but takes up a surprisingly large chunk of the running time when the trailers solely focused on Gerard Butler shooting people on an island.
Once you do get to the action-movie part of the proceedings, the film is entertaining enough without ever doing anything to warrant a permanent residence in my memory. Plane is R-rated, but just barely. The gunfights are fine, but fairly bloodless. The hand-to-hand fighting is acceptable, but lacks the flash of something with Jean-Claude Van Damme or the sheer, unapologetic violence of Stallone. Hell, the convict/sidekick character even bludgeons a couple of bad guys with a hammer in a way that’s only a drop of blood away from a PG-13. It’s all serviceable enough to keep one’s attention but it aspires to little else.
The characters are all paint-by-numbers. Harkening back to a couple of movies that I already mentioned, Butler is basically playing a cross between John McClane (Die Hard) and Casey Ryback (Under Siege) while the convict/sidekick (played by Mike Colter) is basically Nicholas Cage’s character from Con Air. The problem is that I intend those comparisons only in terms of functional types, as the generic writing doesn’t allow these characters to become as charismatic or entertaining as their action movie predecessors. The villains don’t help matters, as they are the type of generic cannon fodder that would get mowed down in an Expendables movie while the heroes are en route to a more interesting villain that never materializes here.
From a writing standpoint, I’m concerned about the number of times that I’ve used the word “generic” in this review, but that really is the most apt word here. Plane definitely isn’t a bad movie, in fact it’s perfectly decent, but it certainly isn’t an ambitious film either. If you like 90s action movies and wish that they still made ‘em that way, then this is a solid streaming rental for a lazy afternoon. Just don’t expect to remember it by this time next year.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(film)#/media/File:Plane_(2023_film)_poster.png
