film | Cobra commander

Pssst. Hey. Did you hear the one about the motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking plane?

Yeah, so don't even try to pretend that you weren't a little amused by the deafening internet buzz for SNAKES ON A PLANE, a film that's been hyped, parodied and toasted in endless geek-entertainment-blog postings since its sublimely goofy title — which also functions as a pat four-word encapsulation of its sublimely goofy premise — popped up on the 2006 release schedule. And please, take this however you will — and however you decide to take it ultimately depends on your taste for tongue-in-cheek cinema — but Snakes on a Plane actually lives up to its junk-schlock buzz. Lo and behold, it's the Godfather of snakes-on-a-plane movies. And that, I think, is a better-than-alright thing.

See, Snakes on a Plane is all about the ride, both literally and figuratively. The film — in which a bevy of cobras and boas and asps (oh my!) slither through (and in some cases, I mean right through) a group of stock disaster-flick personalities trapped aboard an airborne red eye, of course — heartily embraces its below-sub-lofty ambitions to merely crank out the trashy thrills, and that's where it becomes ridiculously fun in ways that most of its summer-blockbuster ilk (Cars, X-Men III, The Da Vinci Code), for all of their higher pedigrees and glossy posturing, never quite pulled off. Sure, it ain't Kubrick or Kieslowski — the director here is David R. Ellis of Final Destination 2, of which the only nice thing you might say is that it's not Final Destination 3 — but hey, if every movie should be judged on how successful it is at what it attempts to do, Snakes on a Plane: A) contains a lot of snakes; B) takes place on a plane; and C) administers a steady flow of slimy jolts played with a wily smirk. It's as good as a movie called Snakes on a Plane could be, and it sets the bar pretty damn high for future entries in the burgeoning reptiles-in-transportation genre.

Oh, I almost forgot: As a nervous passenger wonders after a particularly grisly attack, "Why are there snakes on the plane?" Well, snakes are on the plane — and I love love love how the script is peppered with various uses of the "snakes on a plane" phraseology — because they were hidden in the cargo hold by an Asian gangster (Byron Lawson) in a wacky attempt to crash the flight and kill the government witness (Wolf Creek's Nathan Phillips) who's going to testify against him. As the badass FBI escort who proves to be considerably less ophidiophobic than Indiana Jones, Samuel L. Jackson sells the shit outta his silly dialogue, whether he's barking orders in the authoritative tone that made him famous ("Everybody listen! We need to put a barrier between us and the snakes!") or calming down for a brief character moment (when the snakes cut the plane's A/C: "I'm from Tennessee, I hadn't noticed. Anyway, heat's the least of our worries right now"). I hate to admit it in a public forum, but Fangsgiving: Snakes from the Plane Bite Back doesn't seem like such a bad idea. B+