directed by Robert Schwentke.
Written by Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray.
Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Sean Bean, Marlene Lawston, Matthew Bomer, Mary Gallagher, Shane Edelman
Running time: 93 minutes. Rated PG-13 . Year 2005.
If Alfred Hitchcock were alive today he might make a movie like "Flightplan". In fact, the film's contained setting echoes Hitchcock's 1944 close-quarter classic "Lifeboat," which, as its title suggests, took place entirely in a life raft adrift on the open sea.
German director Robert Schwentke takes on a similar cinematic challenge -- succeeding for the most part -- with this smartly crafted and tautly paced psychological thriller, whose action, following in the tailwinds of Wes Craven's "Red Eye," plays out within the claustrophobic confines of a commercial airplane during a transatlantic flight from Berlin to New York.
Jodie Foster stars as Kyle Pratt, an American aeronautics engineer living in Germany who is distraught over the recent -- and suspicious -- death of her husband.
Flying aboard a luxurious jumbo jet she helped design, Kyle wakes to find that her young daughter (Marlene Lawston) has mysteriously vanished midflight without a trace.
She frantically searches the double-decker cabin, accusing an Arab man of foul play, and rattling the other passengers, much to the consternation of the flight attendants (Erika Christensen and Kate Beahan).
Kyle is pushed to the edge when the passenger list reveals no evidence that her daughter was ever on board, forcing her to question her sanity, as does the plane's captain (Sean Bean), while an air marshal (Peter Sarsgaard) is caught between wanting to believe her and doing his job.
Is she crazy? Or is there something fishy going on in the not-so-friendly skies?
Foster is excellent and her convincing maternal meltdown is one with which any mother would empathize. (The script was originally written with a male lead.)
In addition to tapping into "every parent's worst nightmare" fears of losing one's child, the movie also plays on post-9/11 air travel anxieties. (An early draft predating the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, involved terrorists but was changed for obvious reasons.)
Schwentke maintains a high suspense altitude for much of the film, though the script experiences increasing turbulence in its story logic and plausibility, leading -- as with "Red Eye" -- to a more conventional, but less ridiculous, action climax.
Apart from some minor chase-related violence (someone gets thunked pretty hard with a fire extinguisher), there's not much in the way of objectionable content.
If you can look past its more preposterous plot elements, "Flightplan" is an intelligent nail-biter that keeps you guessing. And though the final departure is a bit disappointing, for its genre, it's worth boarding.
The film contains several intense sequences, some violence including the bad guy meeting a fiery end, minimal crude language and profanity. The USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is A-III -- adults. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is PG-13 -- parents are strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.
Here�s a film that�s guaranteed not to be playing as your in-flight movie any time soon.
The concept is a simple as they come: Distraught Kyle (Jodie Foster) loses her daughter on a jumbo jet. Where the hell could she have gone?
The idea is simple, but journeyman director Robert Schwentke does at least throw in a few good spins for us. Kyle is headed from Berlin to New York because her husband has mysteriously died. Kyle also happens to be an aircraft engineer, and the jet she�s flying home on � a double-decker monster that seats over 400 people � is one she helped design (a fact that will be of critical importance later). (It�s hard to describe much more of this film without giving away some of its surprises, so if you�re intent on seeing it, best to skip ahead two paragraphs.)
While Kyle is napping midway through the flight � and with hubby�s coffin in the cargo hold below � daughter Julia vanishes. Kyle starts to look for her. No one�s seen her, not the flight attendants, not the neighboring passengers, nobody. In fact, no one remembers her getting on the plane at all, and when she finally gets the captain (Sean Bean) out of the flight deck, she can�t even produce Julia�s boarding pass. Convinced against all probability that Julia has been kidnapped, Kyle becomes increasingly panic-stricken as she demands repeated searches of the plane, accuses an Arab of planning to hijack the jet, and generally going insane until she has to be restrained by a kindly air marshal (Peter Sarsgaard), who gives her his begrudging sympathy.
Given that we�ve seen Kyle hallucinate up to three times in the first five minutes of the film, all signs seem to point to this being an elaborate psychosis, and for the first hour of the film, there�s no evidence to the contrary. In fact, the clincher comes when the good captain gets news from Berlin that Kyle�s husband isn�t the only one who�s dead: So is the daughter.
There�s honestly nothing in the first two-thirds of the film to indicate that we�re dealing with anything other than a crazy, crazy, crazy woman here � but let�s not forget this is Hollywood, and a monster twist finally flies at us out of nowhere.
Critics and viewers will be quick to peg this as another Panic Room, and the similarities are uncannily accurate (most notably in the choice of lead actress). But for all its manipulative histrionics, Panic Room made sense, and Flightplan does not. None at all, really. To believe its fundamental setup -- that no one on a 400-passenger transcontinental flight and no one at the airport ever saw the girl get on the plane � requires a Herculean suspension of disbelief. Ditto buying that no one would think to call, say, Kyle�s parents to ask them if she�s bringing her (living) daughter with her on her trip. Besides, anyone who�s traveled with a child knows that unobtrusiveness is not a strong point.
And still, Schwentke proves that really great production values can almost make you forget about failings in the script department. Flightplan�s �E474� is a hell of an impressive set, with secret compartments and trap doors and hatches leading to scary computer rooms and ominous crawlspaces. Never mind that whoever designed such a plane would have been fired after proving how easy it is for passengers to access any part of it unhindered, it sure does look good on film.
How can a little girl simply disappear from an airplane at 37,000 feet? By asking this question and not cheating on the answer, "Flightplan" delivers a frightening thriller with an airtight plot. It's like a classic Locked Room Murder, in which the killer could not possibly enter or leave, but the victim is nevertheless dead. Such mysteries always have solutions, and so does "Flightplan," but not one you will easily anticipate. After the movie is over and you are on your way home, some questions may occur to you, but the film proceeds with implacable logic after establishing that the little girl does not seem to be on board.
The movie stars Jodie Foster in a story that bears similarities to her "Panic Room" (2002). In both films, a woman uses courage and intelligence to defend her child against enemies who hold all the cards. The problem she faces in "Flightplan" is more baffling: Who are her enemies? Why would they kidnap her daughter? How is it possible on an airplane?
For that matter, has it really happened? Foster plays Kyle Pratt, a jet propulsion engineer who has been employed in Germany on the design of the very airplane she is now using to cross the Atlantic. She is on a sad mission. Her husband, David, has died after falling -- she insists he fell and did not jump -- from a rooftop. The coffin is in the hold, and she is traveling with Julia (Marlene Lawston). She falls asleep, she wakes up, and Julia is gone.
Kyle methodically looks around the airplane, calm at first, then on the edge of panic. She tries to seem more rational than she feels, so the crew won't dismiss her as a madwoman. Certainly they're tempted, because the passenger list lacks Julia's name, the departure gate at Munich says she did not get on the plane, and her boarding pass and backpack are nowhere to be found. The captain is Sean Bean, very effective as a man who knows what his job is and how to do it. Peter Sarsgaard plays the in-flight air marshal, under the captain's orders. They receive a message from Munich informing them that Julia was killed along with her father. Obviously, the traumatized mother is fantasizing
And that's all you'll find out from me. There is no one else I want to mention, no other developments I want to discuss, no other questions I want to raise. If someone tries to tell you anything else about "Flightplan," walk away.
The movie's excellence comes from Foster's performance as a resourceful and brave woman; from Bean, Sarsgaard and the members of the cabin crew, all with varying degrees of doubt; from the screenplay by Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray; and from the direction by Robert Schwentke, a German whose first two films were not much seen in North America. This one will be.
I want to get back to the notion of the airtight plot. Often in thrillers we think of obvious questions that the characters should be asking, but do not, because then the problems would be solved and the movie would be over. In "Flightplan," Foster's character asks all the right questions, and plays the situation subtly and with cunning: She knows that once she crosses a line, she will no longer be able to help her daughter. There are times when she's ahead of the audience in her thinking, anticipating the next development, factoring it in.
As the situation develops, her response is flexible. Her tactics are improvised moment by moment, not out of some kind of frantic acting-out. Because she does what we would do, because she makes no obvious mistakes, because of the logic of everything the crew knows, she seems trapped. A passenger cannot disappear from an airplane, and Julia has disappeared, so either her mother is hallucinating, or something has happened that is apparently impossible.
Schwentke is limited, but not constrained, by the fact that most of his movie takes place on an airplane in mid-air. He uses every inch of the aircraft, and the plot depends on the mother's knowledge of its operation and construction. If she didn't know the plane better, really, than its pilots, her case would be hopeless. Even with her knowledge, she comes up against one bafflement after another. Should she doubt her sanity? Should we? We have, after all, seen Julia on the airplane. But for that matter, in two early scenes we saw, and she saw, her husband David, after he was dead. They spoke
After the mysterious death of her husband, Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) and her daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston) are looking forward to relocating from Germany to New York City. After boarding an airplane she helped design, Kyle settles down for a nap, only to awaken and find that Julia is missing. Frenzied, Kyle demands the plane be searched, which irritates the flight attendants, and raises the suspicions of one of the passengers (Peter Sarsgaard). When each search comes up empty, fellow passengers start becoming agitated, and the captain of the plane (Sean Bean) wary of her motives, Kyle is forced to confront her own sanity and accept that Julia might not have existed at all.
It�s not any fault of �Flightplan� that it has to come out a month after Wes Craven�s rollicking �Red Eye.� After gorging on Craven�s outrageous airplane thriller like it was a Halloween night candy bonanza, �Flightplan� dares to mount a similar nightmare-in-the-sky experience, this time crusted with a little more refinement and an A-list acting pedigree.
Jodie Foster returns to a big screen starring role after her 2002 hit, �Panic Room.� At first glance, the two films are quite similar, requiring the veteran actress to play an extremely physical part, maintaining intensity like a pro while crawling around tight spaces and confronting everyone in sight. �Flightplan� is a good example of Foster�s uncanny ability to make almost any material work, and her performance here is a major reason why �Flightplan� has credible moments of both nail-biting suspense and terrifically goofy fun. She commits entirely to the premise and the wonderful airplane set design, elevating the film slightly above the B-list level it has its sights set on.
Directed by German-born Robert Schwentke, �Flightplan� is a picture that is entirely about the art of persuasion. To delve into the plot too far would give away the surprises that Schwentke and his screenwriters have in store for the audience, much like �Red Eye.� However, Schwentke takes the opposite route of Craven, and begins to fancy himself a Hitchcockian type of director, taking the film very seriously, even when the screenplay begins to veer off into la-la land. Schwentke knows how to assemble a good suspense sequence, and �Flightplan� sets itself apart by freely exploring the post 9/11 airline world with its collection of undercover air marshals and suspicious Arab passengers. As Kyle searches for her daughter, Schwentke has the advantage on the audience, tossing up multiple theories on what is going on. Is Kyle nuts? Is she a threat? Is Julia really dead? For a good solid hour (minus a faulty opening 10 minutes), the audience has no idea, and �Flightplan� exploits the terror and mystery of the situation exceedingly well.
When truths are finally revealed in the second half, �Flightplan� slips into action mode, and things become increasingly hard to swallow. Schwentke doesn�t seem prepared to handle the more outlandish moments of the extended climax, but the scenes work regardless since the film is so blessed with acting talent. By this time in the film, the audience is ready for a little brutality, and Schwentke is willing to give it to them, just not with the same quality of execution found in the first half.
The finale doesn�t come across as a disappointment, but it doesn�t match the sleek and efficient craftsmanship of the set-up, leaving �Flightplan� hanging when it needs the strongest punch.
"Flightplan" is an airborne thriller that has just enough catchy "set-up" to fill a solid 45 minutes (and one heck of an intriguing trailer), but "set-up" material can only be stretched so far before the filmmakers are required to commit to a definite course of action. And once that happens in "Flightplan," you're doomed to a third-act miasma of moronic plot twists, pointless red herrings, and more plot holes than a three-acre graveyard.
Adding some much-welcome class to a very standard psychological thriller is Ms. Jodie Foster, the always-welcome actress who consistently manages to make even the skimpiest material something a little bit special. Foster plays a bereaved recent widow who, along with her 6-year-old daughter, is flying from Germany to New York with her dead husband's coffin tucked firmly into the cargo hold.
After she and her daughter drift off to sleep, Kyle (Foster) awakens to find her little moppet gone. But, heck, they're 30,000 feet above the ground in an airplane, so the kid couldn't have gone too far, right? Well, no. Apparently little Ms. Blondie is nowhere on the plane, which means that Kyle may not only be in serious mourning about her newly dead hubby -- she might also be stark raving bonkers.
And off goes Flightplan, seemingly under the mistaken impression that a jazzed-up airplane rendition of The Lady Vanishes (splashed with a little dose of The Forgotten) could ever be mistaken for a fresh, unique, or startlingly engaging concept. As the movie ticks by, the audience members catch wind of the gimmicks well before the screenwriters reveal the silliness. Basically, the flick can go one of two ways: Either Kyle IS nuts and there was no kid -- or there IS a kid and someone's up to no good.
Once you get to that point in the story, everything locks blandly into place, and as the onscreen insanity gets more and more outrageous, you'll find yourself thinking back over Flightplan's first 40 minutes, wondering where the craftiness and unpredictability wandered off to. The best sort of adrenalin thrillers are the ones that spark post-movie conversations about "I didn't expect THAT..." and "Can you believe that she did THAT..."
Annoyingly, most of the conversations that will take place following Flightplan will consist of questions like "Wait, but what about that ONE scene where..." and "But here's what I don't get..." And this is not a case of moviegoers not keeping up with a fast-paced tale; it's an example of sloppy screenwriting across the board. When it's all over and done with, Flightplan seems a hell of a lot sillier than it did when the movie was playing. Well, at least the first 40-some minutes, anyway.
The movie's directed with a crisp eye and some fluid little flourishes, and Jodie Foster makes the whole thing perfectly watchable, but one can't help but think "Flightplan" is all premise and practically no plot; it's a high-concept idea that was never fleshed out into anything resembling a cohesive and satisfying story, which means we'll get a few tight-knuckled moments -- followed by even more moments that are head-scratchingly stupid.
Sometimes movie critics have to make wagers with themselves, and I�ve already lost my latest. I bet myself I could go an entire review of �Flightplan� without invoking the name of Alfred Hitchcock, and yet there�s simply no other way of opening a film that�s so Hitchcockian, right down to its bone. Bring in Jodie Foster in the leading role, and I�ve doubly lost my bet - I find myself compelled to mention how her last major feature was �Panic Room,� David Fincher�s own ode to the master of suspense.
There are two ways a Hitchcock reference can go: it can play out as �boy, this movie really wants to be a Hitchcock-level thriller, but it�s just not up to snuff,� or it can play out as �boy, this movie really wants to be a Hitchcock-level thriller, and you know what?� �Flightplan,� from director Robert Schwentke and screenwriters Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray, is of the latter. Which brings me to: You know what? It works.
The film�s premise is deceptively simple. Troubled mom (Foster) and daughter (Kate Beahan) plan to leave Germany and return to New York following the death of dad. On the flight, mom takes a nap, wakes up to find daughter missing, panics. The ultimate hook: she�s told her daughter was never on the plane.
It�s part �The Lady Vanishes,� part �Bunny Lake Is Missing,� and part �The Forgotten� - all without seeming like it�s �part� anything. Only in the final act does it resort to familiar territory, relying on standard thriller plot points to provide a workable solution. (The finale is ill-fitting and clich�d, but surprisingly satisfying.) All that comes before works with a nervous energy and unsettling mood that informs the viewer that things are not right. It�s a sensation that works to the story�s advantage marvelously.
The key to the film is Foster, who reminds us why she�s so missed these days on the screen. Here is an actor who takes what could have been a standard, unimpressive thriller and turns it into a psychological marvel. By believing in the material, she delivers an endlessly impressive, endlessly gripping performance, one that sells the terror without hesitation.
This is a movie about fear, about phobia, and Foster�s nailbiter of a performance helps drive this point home. Dowling and Ray�s script is one that plays off every fear-of-flying terror we have, which are then heightened by the addition of that ultimate fear, the fear of losing one�s child. This is not a movie bound to make any parent comfortable, by any means, and the filmmakers know it. They�re out to push buttons, and the snowballing panic that ensues forced each scene to be more powerful than the last.
Well, that is until that aforementioned final act, in which the screenplay shrugs, realizing that after so long, it has to come up with some kind of workable answer. It�s the curse of any deliciously unsolvable mystery: the fun is in the not knowing, but sooner or later, knowing will have to become an option. And so we get your typical thriller-on-a-plane stuff; it works on its own terms, to be sure, and it�s quite fun in a dopey sense, but considering how smart the rest of the film had been, it comes off as a bit of a letdown.
But it�s not nearly enough to sink the film. �Flightplan� is effortlessly effective, using a strong cast (supporting players include Sean Bean and Peter Sarsgaard) and a complete understanding of how to turn such a simple setting into an inescapably claustrophobic affair. Schwentke keeps the sense of dread cranked throughout, and while his ode to Hitchcock isn�t as airtight as �Panic Room,� it still does its job remarkably well, supplying a solid dose of thrills and a gripping sense of unease that makes for one noteworthy thriller.
The weight of Flightplan rests entirely on Jodie Foster�s shoulders. She�s practically in every shot. Unfortunately, Foster isn�t simply heaving a substandard thriller on her poor back. She�s also attempting to lift a terrible script, one-note direction, and a ton of clich�d scenes. To top it all off, Foster�s participation in the ludicrous third act, to continue my metaphor, may be just as damaging as a senior citizen lifting barbells from the waist, and may cause Foster to fire her chiroprac� oops�her agent.
Her attraction to this project is not surprising though. Jodi Foster is more prone to fads than an eleven-year-old at Toys-R-Us. She began her career as a lovable tom-boy actor, played a sluttish Lolita-type in the 70s, turned to portraying career-minded women passed over because of their gender in the late 80s and early 90s, and has now moved comfortably into a series of movies about shell-shocked mothers protecting their children.
Foster plays Kyle, an airplane engineer who has a rough time after her husband �accidentally� topples off the roof of their home in Germany. Was it a suicide? Was it an accident? Was he intentionally reducing his role to cameo status? Foster just doesn�t know.
Her husband�s passing doesn�t stop Kyle from taking long nighttime walks with him in the snow. Perhaps these delusional or phantasmagoric episodes are why Foster decides to take her doe-like daughter, Julia, and move back to America to start anew.
Foster and her daughter travel via an airplane the size of Berlin (and with more bathrooms too.) There are lounges, bars, multiple levels, secret panels, luggage compartments, baggage hold (complete with a brand new car within), a cockpit and flat screen televisions everywhere.
Once aboard, Kyle and her daughter fall asleep. When Kyle wakes, her greatest CNN-induced nightmare has been realized�her pretty white child has disappeared, and apparently none of the other passengers remembers her. Is her daughter real, or another delusion?
As realization and doubt creep into Kyle�s subconscious, she storms through the plane with the determination of General Macarthur and a battle cry of, �Where�s my daughter? Where�s my daughter? Where�s my daughter? Where�s my daughter?�
She does get limited help from Captain Boromir, son of Denathor (Sean Bean unsuccessfully attempting to shed typecasting) and a mellow air marshal, Peter Sarsgaard. However, they offer minimal help and maximum doubt.
In the end, Kyle must take charge by forcefully searching every nook and cranny of the plane through sneakiness and sabotage. In this post 9/11 era, I found it perturbing that engineers would place crucial hardware in a crawl space easily accessible from the bathroom.
This is a one-note film, where every scene carries the exact amount of tension and pacing as the previous one. There is no variety, and if one were to shuffle the scenes around in a random order, Flightplan would feel exactly the same.
The film ends with Foster learning that the conniving pilot kidnapped her daughter in an attempt to sell her to a German child slave labor ring. In all seriousness, I made that up, and I don�t want to spoil the ending for you. However, my invented ending accurately simulates the sense of bewilderment you will experience when Flightplan finally reveals its conclusion.
In Flightplan, Jodie Foster plays Kyle Pratt, an aircraft propulsion system designer who has recently lost her husband. She boards a plane to take his ashes back from Germany, accompanied by her 6 year-old daughter. However all does not go smoothly as she falls asleep early in the flight and awakes to find her daughter missing (sounds like kind of an oxymoron, but you know what I mean). After searching the passenger deck with no success she begins making a nuisance of herself to the cabin crew. The only thing is� no-one seems to actually remember seeing her daughter come on the plane. It�s not possible to say too much else without giving away major plot elements, but one way or another there does seem to be a possibility that her imagination is playing rather major tricks on her.
Trying to keep her under control is the Air Marshall, Carson (Peter Sarsgaard) � most of the time, trying to keep her under control pretty unsuccessfully. As a designer she has a good knowledge of the whole plane�s structure (not really convinced that someone who specialises in propulsion systems would have as good a knowledge of all the other workings of the plane as she�s supposed to have, but there you go), and uses this to her advantage. Carson tries to stop her becoming a danger to the other passengers, but is he becoming swayed by her unshakable belief in her daughter being there � and in danger?
The cast is undeniably classy with Foster and Sarsgaard as the main characters, Sean Bean playing the troubled captain, and Greta Saatchi making a short appearance as a therapist. Erika Christensen plays a new stewardess (�it�s true honey, it�s okay to hate the passengers�) whose character seems entirely superfluous to the plot, and Kate Beahan plays one of the other stewardesses, whose role in the film becomes apparent near the end. The musical score is okay and the cinematography is nicely done. The special effects are well done. Nearly the whole film is set on the plane, a double-decker, and the environment is realistically presented (insofar as it�s a fictional plane � an �Aalto E-474�).
Some of the scenes did work up a bit of tension so it�s not a complete disaster as far as being a suspense movie is concerned. However, at the end of the day this is a fairly typical �woman in peril, no-one believes me but I know I�m right� psychological thriller. The script is decent enough and contains a few laughs to break the tension, and has a bit of social awareness (i.e. everyone being suspicious of Arabs on the flight). There is also quite a clever plot twist; unfortunately, there is also a really stupid one, which coupled with a few somewhat illogical moments make it difficult to suspend your belief long enough to really start enjoying the film. For me it started out at a slight disadvantage people I have a general apathy towards this sort of film unless they are really good, and I�m afraid that Flightplan is only moderately good. If the ending had been better I think I might have given it a recommended, but as it is I�d have to say that, while better than I was expecting, Flightplan is really only a so-so thriller with a few good moments, but overall not worth watching unless you really like the genre.