Film Review: Plane

Welcome back to the blog, readers. I just got out of the theater after seeing the new Gerard Butler action flick Plane, and I wanted to share my spoiler-free thoughts. So the premise of Plane sees Butler playing a flight pilot who after being forced to fly through a storm has to crash land on a remote island. There, he realizes he must free a prisoner he was transporting in order to save his passengers from an opposing separatist force.

I have been hearing positive word of mouth and my family really wanted to see this film, and there's usually some sort of division. I mostly like things they don't and in this case, they like things that I don't. (If you didn't understand that, I was saying that I didn't like this film too much.) I thought it was kind of bland and did not work in some areas.

I do like Gerard Butler (who kills it in the Has Fallen series, and you will not tell me otherwise) and his performance here was decent enough to keep this from being terrible. Everybody else's performances felt phoned in and I could not care about anybody else. Even Tony Goldwyn couldn't save this one from itself.

For a film that bills itself as an action thriller, there really isn't too much action and I found myself bored by the final act. The plane crash did not even look real, and there were a few points where I could even see the green screen. The shootout in the climax is unengaging and feels like it was put there just to be there.

One final point of concern is the pacing of the film. The plane crash happens over a span of 30 minutes, and the kidnapping by the separatists doesn't even happen until an hour in. It would have worked better if the crash happened in the first 10 minutes and then after spending 10 minutes or so getting to know all of our characters, you go into the kidnapping. What we got felt absolutely rushed and the payoff in the end felt unearned.

So to conclude my thoughts, Plane is a by-the-book action film that struggles to find its footing with uninteresting characters and uneven pacing.

Thank you all for reading, and I'll see you for the next post.