Off course

Review by Vives Anunciacion

Flightplan
Directed by Robert Schwentke
Written by Peter Dowling, Billy Ray
Starring Jodie Foster, Sean Bean, Peter Sarsgaard
PG 13 / 93 minutes
Buena Vista International/ Columbia Pictures
Opens November 9

A Jodie Foster movie is a required viewing simply because she’s in it. As Sommersby director John Amiel put it, “if God had designed a perfect acting machine, it would be pretty close to Jodie.” Flightplan may not be a top-notch thriller, but Foster’s performance in it is first-class, as usual.

Flightplan carries the story of jet propulsion engineer Kyle Pratt (Foster), who is flying from Berlin with her daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston) to bury her late husband in New York. Midway through her trans-Atlantic flight, Julia disappears without a trace. Kyle’s fears mount as she makes a frantic search for her lost six-year-old child.

Insisting that something wrong has happened to Julia, Kyle manages to ask flight Captain Rich (squarely played by Sean Bean) to instruct the entire crew to search the plane. But no one else remembers seeing Julia being on board. Without a name in the flight manifest and without a boarding pass to prove Julia was ever on board, everyone begins to suspect that Kyle is having a delusional nervous breakdown. To calm her down, air marshall Carson (Peter Sarsgaard, recently in Skeleton Key) offers his help to look for whatever it is Kyle is really looking for.

But her smarts and her maternal instincts know better. The more Kyle looks for her daughter, the more she is convinced that something devious is responsible for the disappearance of her child, that Julia is somewhere in the plane, and more importantly, that she is not losing her mind.

Set almost entirely inside a passenger plane (as was Wes Craven’s thriller Red Eye shown a few months back), Flightplan is a combination of David Fincher’s Panic Room (which also starred Foster) and suspense master Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938). Flightplan is a well-crafted thriller that delivers the excitement, if only for a few weaknesses in the plot.

That an entire passenger plane manages to miss one small child, without anyone seeing her, is a little farfetched. Why an airplane engineer such as Kyle Pratt was considered a proper alibi for the real terror besieging the plane is a huge risk and miscalculation on the part of the criminals. However, the movie manages to suspend the viewer’s disbelief with perfect-pitch acting, cleverly set-up characters, and suspenseful timing.

Flightplan’s plot rests on how Kyle can convince an entire airplane full of people that her missing child is real, despite looking having all the facts pointing against her and her sanity. Foster was so convincing as a mother in the cusp of a nervous breakdown, it wouldn’t have been surprising had the story ended with a “delusional” angle.

Thankfully for the actors of Flightplan, they add to the believability of the story where the plot takes terrible turns.

Flightplan may not have a foolproof premise, and it may not reach the levels of classic thrillers – but proficient directing, sharp editing and intelligent acting keep the shaky story above the clouds. Fasten your seatbelts, Flightplan is a thrilling ride.