Directed by: Jean-François Richet
Starring: Gerard Butler, Mike Colter, Yoson An, Daniella Pineda
Rated R, 107 minutes
When did a trip to the movies become an advertising ambush? Within seconds of entering the cinema where I saw “Plane,” a dozen mounted LED displays were already trying to sell me various combo meals from the concessions stand. I made my way down a hall lined with posters and pop-up displays for upcoming films, past taglines so bland they could be used for anything (“You can’t run from your past,” warns the display for—obviously—“Creed III”). In the theater itself, of course, there were the usual 15 minutes of previews, a mixed bag of trailers ranging from gravitas to unconvincing gravitas. Finally, after the lights went down, after one last parting shot—earn points with the theater’s mobile app!—“Plane,” the most unmarketable movie I’ve ever seen, began.
It’s a rare day that I feel bad for big-budget advertisers, especially after I’ve just passed through a gauntlet of their wheedling exhortations, but “Plane” has filled me with sympathy. Let’s start with the title. Is it an intentional nod to “Airplane!” and, more broadly, to the timeless air disaster genre? Is it supposed to strike a monolithic and surreal tone, as if to suggest that this movie takes place on some hypothetical plane of existence? Was it called “The Plane” and then the producers, inspired by Justin Timberlake’s famous “Drop the The” line in “The Social Network,” cut the definite article? I found myself thinking, instead of these possibilities, of the brandless foods and medicines sold at grocery stores and pharmacies. Why pay full price for a name-brand movie when you could see “Plane” instead?
The problem (one of them, anyway) is that “Plane” never makes the case against its own anonymity. There are characters, and they have names, but no souls. They speak, certainly, and occasionally do things like quiver in fear or look at one another significantly, but we grow attached to none of them. This is not a complaint about acting; there are actually a few subtly engaging performances, namely from supporting players Yoson An (“Mulan”) and Daniella Pineda (“Cowboy Bebop”), whose talents will hopefully have a chance someday to flourish in movies where they will be valued.
The plot around these almost-characters is undone by its own inanity. A flight goes down in a bad storm, crash-landing on an island in the Philippines that happens to be home to—bad luck!—militant separatists, who take the survivors hostage. Our captain, the heroic RAF vet Brodie Torrance (Gerard Butler, “300”), having already steered a malfunctioning airplane to relative safety, now partners up with one of his passengers, Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter, “Luke Cage”), to free the hostages and get everyone home.
Now add all the pieces that either make no sense or contribute nothing to the plot, from little oddities—on a flight with 14 passengers, two of them have evidently selected seats in row 34—to confounding oversights. The big one is that Gaspare is a murderer facing extradition (until the plane crashes, anyway). Yet despite the gravity of his past, nothing ever comes of it. Like many subplots and suggestions of drama that might unfold, Gaspare’s criminality is merely set decoration, as much a part of the background as the featureless jungle in which our unlucky characters have found themselves.
What “Plane” gets right, at least, is its action sequences. In an early one, Torrance fights off an unnamed militiaman, the brawl slowly dragging them around an abandoned office. The scene, filmed in a long take, is magnetic. But this emphasis on action is also the movie’s Achilles’ heel. A band of American mercenaries eventually arrives on the scene, their military-grade firepower the catalyst for an exciting gunfight but ultimately a cop-out from the movie’s other sources of suspense. You may feel tense watching “Plane,” but never for long.
The obvious and accurate joke here, the one those poor advertisers had to bite their lips to avoid drawing attention to, is that “Plane” is plain. (Unlucky, then, that the movie poster is tinted the dull color of dry grass.) Like last year’s Michael Bay spectacle “Ambulance,” “Plane” derives its sense of self from one of the vehicles of modern life, but unlike that movie, which made its common setting as bewildering and aggressive as a defibrillator shock, “Plane” is content with a steady, unremarkable heartbeat. It’s not deceptively simple, it’s just simple.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 1/27/23.