Posted: 09/24/2005

Flightplan

(2005)

by Hank Yuloff

If I could discuss all of the ins and outs of Flightplan here I might end up having a different review than this may read. But to go through all of the points, I would have to give up the plot twists and if you go see the movie, that would not be fair to you.

Jody Foster (Contact, Anna and the King) stars as Kyle Pratt, a newly widowed mechanical engineer based in Berlin who, along with her daughter Julia, is bringing her husband’s body back to the United States. After settling herself and Julia (Marlene Dawston) into their seats, she takes a nap only to wake up three hours into the flight with her daughter missing. But when she reports her vanished daughter to the flight crew, no one seems to remember her bringing Julia on board, nor is she on the passenger manifest. The flight crew is even faxed information saying that Julia died in the same accident as her father. Is Pratt crazy? Or is something else going on here? This is what we are left to find out.

I knew going in that this was the released premise so I was watching (Sixth Sense like) to see if Julia really existed prior to the flight or if any one of the crew or other passengers saw her get on the flight. Director Robert Schwentke (Tattoo) did a good job of being evasive because we never see anyone look directly at the child on the way to the airport or in the terminal. We then cut to Foster and Dawston being the first ones onto the plane, but never see a crew member so we don’t know what happened at the door of the plane. This will factor in later.

The part of me that wants to let you go on the roller coaster without knowing the end would like to tell you that he got kind of tired following Foster’s attempts to prove her sanity. The camera does several fast zooms into her face—the kind used to show that a person is about to go bananas so you should watch closely—just a few too many times to be interesting. I get it. She is under a lot of strain. Her daughter may or may not exist. Her daughter may or may not be in a second coffin loaded onto the plane but Foster refuses to see more than one. Or, as someone who helped design the plane, she may have been targeted for something far more sinister. Butm as the on-board Air Marshall asks, “Why are you so special? Why would you be targeted?”

If you buy into the answers to those questions, this movie, and all that would have to go into the planning of the situation will make a lot of sense to you. If you don’t see how it all gets put together, then you will just be disappointed and think that Foster’s last thriller movie, Panic Room was a much better film.

To me, it just took too damn much of the movie to search for this kid. Watching a flight crew open hatches and bathroom doors is just not very good entertainment. The possibility of this being a Hitchcock type thriller disappeared as quickly and without explanation as Pratt’s daughter. Foster’s insanity wears very thin, very quickly (“And damn, she looks old,” said my wife). So quickly, in fact that when we get to the pay off part of this mystery, you may feel you paid for a first class ticket, only to be placed in coach.

Hank Yuloff is our senior staffer in L.A.

Got a problem? E-mail us at filmmonthly@gmail.com