Flightplan: Movie & DVD Review (2005)

(Originally published 2005)

In the slick, easy new thriller, "Flightplan," six-year-old Julia Pratt (Marlene Lawston) goes missing at 37,000 feet on a transatlantic flight from Berlin to New York. Was it the hasenpfeffer and the currywurst that did her in? Unfortunately for Julia, things look more insidious than that.

For her mother, Kyle (Jodie Foster), a propulsion engineer with bleached features and a set mouth, the problem facing her is a sketchy flight crew that has no record of Julia boarding the plane and no eye witness to prove that she even exists.

Instead, all they have is Kyle's word, which is becoming increasingly shaky as Kyle's fears escalate into the sort of rage that suggests instability.

Worse for Kyle is that the crew learns she recently lost her husband to suicide--he tossed himself off a rooftop and now is in a casket in the belly of the plane.

In the sidelong glances that follow that bombshell, it's clear that everyone here believes they're dealing with a woman whose grief might have got the best of her. This becomes especially true when another revelation comes from the authorities, who are called upon when Kyle starts racing up and down the aisles, accusing the Arab passengers of kidnap and murder, and demanding that "every inch" of the plane be searched for her daughter. What that revelation is won't be revealed here, but it helps to spin the web that creates the noose through which Kyle finds her neck.

To the crew and to the U.S. marshal (Peter Sarsgaard) charged to watch her, there's every indication that recent events have left Kyle unhinged, which will do her no favors in her efforts to get her daughter back. After all, for reasons she can't understand, she knows that somebody here is lying to her.

Directed by Robert Schwentke from a script by Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray, "Flightplan" is well-acted, well-assembled product for the masses. It's nothing to get excited about, nothing to vilify. It has its moments, it has its problems.

The main problem is timing. The movie pales in the wake of Wes Craven's lean, focused "Red Eye," which was taut and kinetic in ways that "Flightplan" isn't. The other problem is that there is a rather large elephant in the room here, which we'll call redundancy. The movie comes too close to "Panic Room," a superior thriller that also featured Foster as a single mother trying to protect her daughter, and it borrows too liberally from Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes," in which a woman goes missing from a train.

If it weren't for Foster's ferocious performance in "Flightplan," there's every indication that audiences might have found themselves on a caboose.

Grade: B-