Flightplan

From AwardAnnals

Reviews

Amazon.com

Like a lot of stylishly persuasive thrillers, Flightplan is more fun to watch than it is to think about. There’s much to admire in this hermetically sealed mystery, in which a propulsion engineer and grieving widow (Jodie Foster) takes her 6-year-old daughter (and a coffin containing her husband’s body) on a transatlantic flight aboard a brand-new jumbo jet she helped design, and faces a mother’s worst nightmare when her daughter (Marlene Lawston) goes missing. But how can that be? Is she delusional? Are the flight crew, the captain (Sean Bean) and a seemingly sympathetic sky marshal (Peter Sarsgaard) playing out some kind of conspiratorial abduction? In making his first English-language feature, German director Robert Schwentke milks the mother’s dilemma for all it’s worth, and Foster’s intense yet subtly nuanced performance (which builds on a fair amount of post-9/11 paranoia) encompasses all the shifting emotions required to grab and hold your attention. Alas, this upgraded riff on Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (not to mention Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing) is ultimately too preposterous to hold itself together. Flightplan gives us a dazzling tour of the jumbo jet’s high-tech innards, and its suspense is intelligently maintained all the way through to a cathartic conclusion, but the plot-heavy mechanics break down under scrutiny. Your best bet is to fasten your seatbelt and enjoy the thrills on a purely emotional level—a strategy that worked equally well with Panic Room, Foster’s previous thriller about a mother and daughter in peril. —Jeff Shannon

Barnes and Noble

A chilling variation on the old “locked room” whodunit, Flightplan is a tense thriller that, like the best of that type, tells a highly improbable story with cold, implacable logic. Jet-propulsion engineer Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster), accompanied by her young daughter, Julia (Marlene Lawston), flies from Berlin to New York on an airliner she helped design. The journey is already a sad one for Kyle: She’s bringing home the body of her recently deceased husband. But the trip gets worse when she wakes up from a mid-flight nap to find Julia gone—and nobody remembers having seen the child to begin with. Working from a nearly airtight script, director Robert Schwentke (Tattoo) extracts the fullest possible measure of suspense from every sequence. His job is made easier by Foster’s sensational performance. The Oscar-winning actress is so convincing as the distraught, tightly wound—and possibly mentally disturbed—widow that you’ll begin to wonder if the child isn’t a figment of her overworked imagination. The supporting players deliver naturalistic, casual portrayals that reinforce Schwentke’s depiction of a normal transatlantic flight thrown into turmoil by the increasingly harsh ravings of what appears to be a deranged woman. Peter Sarsgaard is competence personified as a no-nonsense air marshal; Sean Bean impresses as the concerned captain; and Erika Christensen shines as a sympathetic flight attendant. For its first two-thirds the film recalls Alfred Hitchcock’s classic The Lady Vanishes, but the third act shifts into action-movie mode and brings to mind Die Hard, among others. Once the film is over you may be able to chip away at the solution and find some inconsistencies, but while it’s unfolding Flightplan will keep you glued to your seat—and that’s just what you want in a nail-biter, isn’t it? Ed Hulse