Flightplan

How far can you truly take a story like Flightplan? It never explains the guys looking into the little girl's room, it fails to successfully make you feel sorry for the main character. I wasn't particularly convinced as to how they got all of the people that saw the girl to lie about it. I think this film just did not do a good job in explaining... or should I say viably explaining a lot of what went on in the film. I also found it very boring and could hardly wait for the credits to roll.

Back in 2002, Jodie Foster surprised movie audiences with the spine-tingling PANIC ROOM. The surprise was not that she could pull off a great performance; from her early appearance in TAXI DRIVER, to her Oscar-winning roles in THE ACCUSED and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, she is without question one of the finest actresses of her generation. No, I guess what struck many (myself included) as a tad puzzling, was her interest in what appeared to be a conventional thriller, at a time when she was cutting back her acting duties to focus on motherhood and delving into directing smaller, more intimate films of her own. Upon seeing PANIC ROOM, it was clear that her instincts were as finely tuned as ever; benefiting from both David Koepp's tight script and assured, visually dazzling direction by David Fincher, this riveting Hitchcokian crowd-pleaser proved to be an ideal showcase for Foster's considerable acting chops, allowing her to flesh out the role of a recently divorced mother fending off a trio of burglars in her new Manhattan brownstone. Hell, by the time the ending credits began to roll, I could easily picture her alongside Sigourney Weaver fighting off aliens on some backwater planet. She was that good.

Still, I was equally surprised when her first leading role since PANIC ROOM was in another thriller again playing a newly single mother trying to protect her daughter in a confined space (this time on an airliner during a transatlantic flight). Here, she plays Kyle Pratt, a jet propulsion engineer en route from Germany to New York with her six-year-old daughter in tow; the dead body of her husband, who died a week earlier under suspicious circumstances, is also coming along for the ride. Midway through the flight, the girl disappears and an already tightly-wound Pratt frantically searches for her. As the efforts of the flight crew continue to prove fruitless, the evidence begins to stack up that the girl was never on the plane in the first place. Is the grieving Pratt delusional or is she correct in her theory that she's been dragged into some nefarious plot that somehow involves the kidnapping of her child?

It's difficult to dissect FLIGHTPLAN without giving away the plot twists that are meant to make sense out of the story (they don't, by the way), but suffice it to say that the end results are largely disappointing. Naturally, enjoying these kinds of movies requires you to suspend a good deal of logic and belief, but there's just too much here that struck me as false or unconvincing. In a strange way, I blame 1999's THE SIXTH SENSE for this; ever since M. Night Shyamalan's masterful film pulled the wool over our eyes and delivered that climactic punch to the gut, I watch any movie featuring a built-in dramatic hook with more suspicious eyes. In any case, the events of FLIGHTPLAN's first two-thirds make it desperately clear that we're expected to doubt Pratt's claims. Therefore, it comes as little surprise that the beleaguered woman is closer to the mark than her fellow passengers would suspect. Okay, so maybe that's a bit of a spoiler, but come on after spending an hour casting doubt on her beliefs, where else can this predictable story go?

Watching Foster in a near-constant state of anguish for an hour and a half - her already pale face turning ghost-white from the strain - proves to be an exhausting experience. There is never a doubt that she's giving the performance her all (same goes for an impressive supporting cast that includes Peter Sarsgaard, Sean Bean and Erika Christensen), but the clumsy script lets everybody down at almost every turn. I remain no less impressed by her considerable talents, but I have to wonder what made Foster settle for such a half-baked project. To be honest, the movie is no worse than the average Hollywood thriller that hits the big screen; I guess I just expected more from the actress' usually keen instincts.

Given their surface similarities, it might be unfair to compare her last two films so closely (her appearance in 2004's A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT was little more than a cameo), but it's also impossible to ignore the fact that PANIC ROOM was a vastly superior pot-boiler in almost every way. For its part, FLIGHPLAN crashes and burns from the weight of its own ineptitude.