I kinda knew what to expect from this movie and with Jodie Foster and others including Sean Bean and Peter Sarsgaard starring I wasn’t surprised to find myself far from disappointed. It’s pretty much The Lady Vanishes with a smaller lady onboard a hi-tech plane in the style of the (I think) fantastic, truly perfect Panic Room. It’s an almost perfect thriller that keeps its length down and its highs up in the stratosphere.

I found that it lags somewhere around the awkward “Arab interrogation” scene (“My daughter is missing, I don’t give a sh*t about being politically correct.”) and the following scene between Foster and The Therapist who happens to be onboard (with the number of people you can fit on a plane now, I realise it’s possible you’ll have pretty much every profession represented – it’s just the kind of serendipity I think never works well in a movie, even a hokey thriller, should be avoided, and certainly not be used to build a whole scene around). But it picks up when Jodie turns into action woman.

I can certainly understand why airline employees were upset about the way the cabin staff come over in the movie – of course, as Foster said in its defense, it is just a movie, and a hokey thriller at that … but it is one of the more ridiculously over-the-top things about the movie that brings it down a step from something like Panic Room. They come over like creepy Stepford-like androids and there’s no particular reason why they are (or at least why they all are) so.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the movie is how Foster’s character is treated – the question of whether her daughter exists or not hangs in the balance for a genuinely unorthodox amount of time, and you end up wondering whose side you’re really on and what to believe for about 75% of the movie. There are times when it feels like the trailer gave away every surprise (I still think it gave a little much), but that particular secret is pretty well-guarded to the point it becomes excruciating. Had anyone else but Foster been playing the part it would’ve simply been too much. I still don’t know whether I really like having a heroine so difficult to connect with, and I can almost imagine a series of alternate endings being shot, at the least to fool spoilers; but it’s certainly different and for Jodie, I can be sure I’ll watch this again.

As to the ending, it’s one of the more corny things in the movie, but I personally thought it was brilliant. There’s a huge element of triumph when you see the bad guy go down that sets the hairs on the back of the neck on end: ‘justice is served’, ‘all is right in the world’, ‘the prick deserved it’, that kind of primal satisfaction that I love especially in a movie like this. I feel the need to put Another Good James Horner Score Alert! on this review too, between this and The New World he was really on a roll last year – I guess he ought to have been considering how lazy he was with Zorro, lol … if he even did any work on that besides saying, “sure, use my themes!” – or maybe I’m just in the mood for him again.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 at 7:18 pm in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.