Flight (12A.)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis.
Starring Denzel Washington, Kelly Reilly, Bruce Greenwood, Don Cheadle, John Goodman and Melissa Leo. 135 mins
After a decade or so devoted to exploring the possibilities of 3D and motion capture, Robert Zemeckis is back making films in the real world with real people. In this case real people like Captain Whip (Washington), your average, everyday, debauched, drug fiend, alcoholic, hero pilot.
No film with a plane crash in is ever part of your on-board entertainment package, but no film does quite as much as Flight to instil a fear of flying in the viewer. It suggests that the average commercial airline is a rattling crate held together by ancient parts that haven’t been serviced for years and your fate is in the hands of a pilot who is still so sloshed from the previous night’s revelries that he isn’t fazed by the experience of plummeting straight towards the earth and, while everybody else is screaming, casually comes up with a miracle manoeuvre to save the plane. It is as if Hunter S Thompson had taken Luke Skywalker place in the cockpit at the end of Star Wars and destroyed the Death Star.
The opening air crash sequence is indeed petrifying but that is over and done with it in the first half hour and after that it just a heap of sanctimonious chat, which might have worked out if any of it was halfway credible but Zemeckis seems to have lost his feel for convincing characters. Washington isn’t just a drunk, he’s a showboater drunk performing heroic acts of hedonistic excess.
The clumsiness of the story telling is hammered home by some blunt music choices. John Goodman’s character – Whip’s drug buddy – is introduced by the opening bars of Sympathy for the Devil; when a woman prepares to shoot up the Red Hot Chilli Pepper’s Under the Bridge strikes up.
Zemeckis is a great fun film maker (Back to the Future, Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump) but at some point he found God or rather the need to discuss God, and whenever he tries to go a bit deeper he usually ends up doing something foolish. Major Spoiler - at one point in the film the caricature Christian couple suggest that the plane crash was all part of God’s plan, that it served a higher purpose. The audience is invited to laugh at, or at least cast scorn on them but ultimately the plot backs them up – over a hundred people suffer a traumatising plane crash and six people die just to get Denzel Washington on the wagon.
.
Directed by Robert Zemeckis.
Starring Denzel Washington, Kelly Reilly, Bruce Greenwood, Don Cheadle, John Goodman and Melissa Leo. 135 mins
After a decade or so devoted to exploring the possibilities of 3D and motion capture, Robert Zemeckis is back making films in the real world with real people. In this case real people like Captain Whip (Washington), your average, everyday, debauched, drug fiend, alcoholic, hero pilot.
No film with a plane crash in is ever part of your on-board entertainment package, but no film does quite as much as Flight to instil a fear of flying in the viewer. It suggests that the average commercial airline is a rattling crate held together by ancient parts that haven’t been serviced for years and your fate is in the hands of a pilot who is still so sloshed from the previous night’s revelries that he isn’t fazed by the experience of plummeting straight towards the earth and, while everybody else is screaming, casually comes up with a miracle manoeuvre to save the plane. It is as if Hunter S Thompson had taken Luke Skywalker place in the cockpit at the end of Star Wars and destroyed the Death Star.
The opening air crash sequence is indeed petrifying but that is over and done with it in the first half hour and after that it just a heap of sanctimonious chat, which might have worked out if any of it was halfway credible but Zemeckis seems to have lost his feel for convincing characters. Washington isn’t just a drunk, he’s a showboater drunk performing heroic acts of hedonistic excess.
The clumsiness of the story telling is hammered home by some blunt music choices. John Goodman’s character – Whip’s drug buddy – is introduced by the opening bars of Sympathy for the Devil; when a woman prepares to shoot up the Red Hot Chilli Pepper’s Under the Bridge strikes up.
Zemeckis is a great fun film maker (Back to the Future, Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump) but at some point he found God or rather the need to discuss God, and whenever he tries to go a bit deeper he usually ends up doing something foolish. Major Spoiler - at one point in the film the caricature Christian couple suggest that the plane crash was all part of God’s plan, that it served a higher purpose. The audience is invited to laugh at, or at least cast scorn on them but ultimately the plot backs them up – over a hundred people suffer a traumatising plane crash and six people die just to get Denzel Washington on the wagon.
.
