“Flightplan”

This is supposedly a suspense thriller, but personally I found that it stalled after the first couple of scenes.

This film is about a child who seemingly disappears during a plane flight with her mother. Everyone looks for the child, yet no one can find her. Both the captain and an air marshal aiding in the search begin to question the mother’s sanity. They begin to suspect the child was never on board to begin with. The mother is still recovering from her husband’s recent unexpected death, and they pretty much determine that the poor woman is delusional and all but abandon the search for the little girl. The mother realizes that if her child is going to be found on this huge airplane, she is the one who will do it because clearly no one else is going to help her.

Now this plot would seem to set the stage for a great action suspense movie, but once it is laid out, the execution falls very short. What we are faced with is scene after scene of the mother running up and down aisles in what is clearly a huge airliner. There is very little action until the end of the film, if the viewer can hang in that long to get to the end.

I think the script for this movie was poorly written, and I think the direction was even worse. The tragic thing is that the writer and director took what could have been a great film (along the order of Arthur Hailey’s Airport classic) and turned it into a B-grade movie. That in itself is tragic.