About 37,000 feet should do nicely.
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The opening credits of
Flightplan
slip and slide diagonally hither and yon, letting canny viewers in on the fact that in many ways it's all An Homage to Hitchcock. Inevitably,
Flightplan
will be compared (and with good reason) to an early British Hitchcock film,
The Lady Vanishes
(1938), though nowhere do the writers admit their debt. Lofty heritage notwithstanding,
Flightplan
doesn't have anything in mind other than being, as its star Jodie Foster has said, "a big fantasy."
Propulsion engineer Kyle Pratt (a pale Foster) has the unenviable responsibility of returning her husband's body to America and repatriating herself and small daughter
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Julia (Marlene Lawston). Our newly widowed protagonist is not entirely compos mentis; we see her the night before departure wandering around by herself in the snow talking to the deceased. Well, you know, it's hard to make friends in a foreign country-
especially one as blue and cold as this sterile Bauhaus Germany (director Robert Schwentke is a Deutschlander himself, and the film's frigid steely photography is the indisputably Teutonic result). Exhausted and sedated, Kyle falls asleep during the beginning of their red-eye back to the US-and awakens to find Julia is gone.
When the patronizing airline hostesses, air marshall (a disappointing Peter Sarsgaard), and captain (Sean Bean, so solid and reassuring you wish he'd run for office) don't perform a very thorough search for the missing girl, Kyle becomes increasingly unhinged-at which point the crew explains to her that Julia's name isn't on the passenger manifest and no one remembers seeing her board; and the Berlin morgue claims that her daughter died alongside her husband. The grief-stricken Kyle's beginning to question her own sanity, as is the audience, when-
And that's all you'll get out of me, because other than 1) Foster's completely dominating performance, 2) some occasionally beautiful photography and 3) a few welcome moments of goofy humor relieving an otherwise mediocre script, all
Flightplan
has going for it are its surprises and an unexpectedly nerve-wracking third act.
Foster's stuck with an indifferent child actress and some lines that would make a lesser mortal quail, but by God she's going to hold this mess up if it kills her-and for the most part, she succeeds, racing around like a wild-eyed, T-shirted Grace Kelly. She may be crazy, but she can certainly screw up an airplane. In a rare interview (with SuicideGirls.com), Foster confesses, "I know it's a mystery to everyone why I choose the things that I do." Well, yes; and also, thanks largely to her formidable magnetism, the last half of
Flightplan
would, if it were an in-flight movie, at least make everyone sit up, blink, rub their eyes and begin to take a bleary interest.
