First is first: Airplane It’s a weird name for a movie, isn’t it? The monosyllabic franchise is creepy, unintentionally hilarious, like a toddler dropping a newly learned word while pointing at something. Airplane. Perhaps even funnier is that this B-movie-adjacent action flick spends just 30 minutes racing around in a real airplane, abandoning the crazy promise of that title before the first act is over.
Airplane is the latest in a subgenre that might be called “Gerard Butler Saves the World,” a cheap-and-cheerful angle of cinema that saw the Scottish tough man battling world-ending comets (Greenland), apocalyptic weather (geostorm) and a series of increasingly ridiculous end-of-the-world terrorists (the Fallen off series). Airplanehowever, it initially finds Butler not in action hero mode, but in regular man mode.
He plays airline pilot Brodie Torrance (the classic name of a Gerard Butler character, who sits proudly next to “Mike Banning” and “Big Nick O’Brien”), an ordinary guy who loves his daughter, loves the his job and is known to have a refusal. When we first meet him, he’s riding a nearly empty flight to Tokyo on New Year’s Eve, joking about the Tannoy and delivering his famous last words (“There’ll be no delays!”).
There may have been a thin, stripped-down thriller simply formed around that initial half hour, so it’s a shame the film immediately shifts into high gear.
A bad omen comes with the arrival of Louis (Mike Colter, as in his Luke cage days, An Absolute Unity), an assassin being transported in handcuffs for his extradition; the storm they are experiencing is a worse omen. Director Jean-François Richet is set on creating a truly tense emergency landing sequence, destined to be cut from future in-flight iterations, in which the plane loses power and is forced to land in total darkness.
It could have been a lean, stripped-down thriller simply formed around that initial half hour, so it’s a shame the film immediately shifts gears; What starts out in a comfortable disaster-movie mold quickly becomes a generic by-the-numbers action thriller, delivering a rancid fare of brawling, shooting, and hostage-taking. More troublingly, the filmmakers show a certain insensitivity bordering on xenophobia towards the real Philippine island of Jolo, where the film takes place, depicted here as an anarchic hellhole run by psychopathic terrorist gangsters. The half million people who actually live in Jolo might not accept being presented as bloodthirsty assassins who, without provocation, freely behead the first Westerners they meet.
All gullibility crumbles in the final act, when the modern day equivalent of the cavalry steps out to save the day, a unit of ex-Special Forces mercenaries, who bravely shoot down evil terrorists, and the shots pour in, thick and fast. But Butler is still decent company for that kind of swashbuckling nonsense, bringing a little off-the-day dad charm and tough-as-nails muscularity to the kind of role that has become his specialty. We just have to ask ourselves: what will he save the world from next?
Source: EmpireOnline
Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.
