reMedia!

An entertainment blog that pops culture right in the kisser.

Thursday, March 16, 2006

film | Hitchcrockian

Jodie Foster takes paranoia to heights usually reserved for liberal arts majors on a weekend toke-a-thon in FLIGHTPLAN, a visually slick thriller that's essentially Foster's own (better) Panic Room at 37,000 feet. In a taut, no-nonsense performance, she plays a widowed aeronautics engineer whose young daughter seemingly disappears from the massive double-decker plane they're aboard somewhere in the airspace between Europe and the states. It's an arresting premise Hitchcock would've loved, and German director Robert Schwentke stages a exceptionally eerie middle act in which Foster becomes so maniacally unglued that her fellow passengers suspect that maybe the child was never actually on the airliner to begin with. It's too bad, then, that Flightplan's final half-hour navigates a bumpy landing and never recovers, largely due to a series of preposterous plot twists that should provoke an "OK, wait" or seven from anybody paying attention. (In other words — SPOILER ALERT — forget how they pulled it off; once revealed, the villains' convoluted scheme hinges on so many variables and such happenstance, I wondered why on earth they bothered.) Yeah, Foster's teetering-on-the-cusp-of-sanity breathlessness engrosses right through to the tacky, we-are-the-world coda, and Schwentke helms his big Hollywood debut with pizazz and pow to spare, but the holes in the story release an unfortunate amount of cabin pressure. C+

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