Film Reviews

Flightplan

• Rating:
• Director: Robert Schwentle
• Starring: Jodie Foster
• Details: US, 98mins, 12s.

Taking her dead husband home to the US for burial, aeroplane propulsion engineer Kyle Pratt (Foster) is more concerned with her daughter Julia's (Marlene Lawston) state of mind than grieving for her own loss. Settling into a long flight from Germany, Kyle falls asleep and wakes some hours later to find Julia missing. With the help of the entire cabin crew and Peter Sarsgaard's sympathetic air marshal, Julia's frantic search proves fruitless. Soon doubts arise that Julia was ever on board and the captain (Bean), suspecting that Kyle is losing her mind, confines her to her seat. But is the kindly air marshal who he says he is? For the first hour, Flightplan is an engaging and cracking thriller. Director Schwentle builds the tension with confidence and is backed up by James Horner's plinky-plonk piano, just in case the atmosphere needed a little help. It didn't.. until the twist, and that's where Schwentle needed all the help he could get. Looking around for assistance, Schwentle finds himself on his own as the clever script had backed itself into a corner and found itself wanting when questions arise - How does a child go missing mid-flight and how come no one saw her on board? The writers have no answers to these, nor an ending to the movie. Schwentle begins to lose the plot too, with a few needless cuts to slow motion and using the preconceptions of Arabs on a flight to create an obvious decoy. Flightplan will entertain the hell out of you for two thirds of the movie and then will cheat you out of your last bit of patience in the final half-hour.

Review by Gavin Burke