Jean-Francois Richet’s Plane, starring Gerard Butler in the lead, isn’t the ideal movie to watch a day before you’ve to board the flight. It’s not some profound musing on air travel and its risks. Like the title suggests, it’s a generic airplane thriller that uses the sub-genre’s tired tropes but makes the most of the same with quick-paced action and relentless thrill.
The film starts off as every other airplane thriller — the pilot Brodie (Butler) promising his estranged daughter he’d make it in time for their New Year’s Eve celebration together (here, it’s NYE; it was her birthday in the recent Bollywood airplane thriller, Ajay Devgn’s Runway 34); The airplane crew discussing possible disaster risks in routine fashion before taking off; and a wide range of eager passengers displaying their signature characteristics before quickly turning into a homogeneous blob.
You see the crash-landing coming from air miles ago so the tension, director Richet, editor David Rosenbloom and Brendan Galvin’s camera attempt to conjure, falls flat on its face, just like a couple of passengers. It’s the bits after the crash-landing on a remote Philippines island where the action shoots up. The passengers are held hostage by militants who rule that island, and the attempts to contact base in the US don’t land either. It’s then left to Butler, and the dark horse a prisoner in custody on flight, Louis (Mike Colter), to team up and rescue the passengers.
It’s refreshing to see Butler not do the heavy-lifting when it comes to action. He’s primarily a pilot, a short-tempered, emotionally broken one at that. It’s in blink-and-miss flashes where Butler uses his taut body language to address his state of mind: He must rescue the passengers in order to redeem himself in his own eyes. Thank god there are no intermittent flashback sequences with his wife and daughter as that would’ve really distracted from all the successive action.
There’s a lot of that here, even though Butler doesn’t heroically lead all of it. However, he does show his prowess as a veteran action star in a hand-to-hand combat with a militant inside a warehouse, where the impressive single-take handheld camera shot amps up the intensity and stakes of the threat at hand. While this could’ve been that offbeat buddy movie or strange-bedfellows action thriller with a pilot and a prisoner, the enigma of Colter’s personality isn’t mined to its optimal capacity here. His dangling motive, however, is sporadically flirted with, without deviating from the action on ground.
The militants, though not neatly etched out or sans any personality, still pose a worthy threat, given their number and unforgiving streak. The idea here isn’t to eliminate them all, but for Brodie to ensure his passengers escape safely. He’s not a brainless hero here, but a thoughtful leader. One is glad that Plane, however much of a cookie cutter, doesn’t enter the everything-goes territory of the recent Bollywood airplane thriller Chor Nikal Ke Bhaga. It keeps the proceedings simple and familiar, but doesn’t end without dialing up the thrill through its electrifying climactic take-off sequence.
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