But even in the movie’s most ridiculous moments, Collet-Serra keeps the pacing brisk and knows how to divert our attention with a well-timed bit of comic relief. That even an air marshal could manage to get away with such behavior in an age when commercial airline passengers have bum-rushed and hog-tied flight disruptors for far less violent offenses stretches the movie’s already elastic sense of plausible reality to the breaking point more than once. The ultimate revelations about Neeson’s semi-amnesiac “Unknown” character notwithstanding, we sense from the start of “Non-Stop” that Marks is a good guy who’s been set up, and for a while the film sustains a reasonably fun game of whodunit, as the body count rises and the hair-trigger Marks begins interrogating passengers with a bedside manner that makes “Taken’s” Bryan Mills seem like Florence Nightingale. He also, it turns out, has his name on that aforementioned bank account.įrom this point forward, viewers are best advised to make with their disbelief as one does with oversized cabin baggage: Check it at the door. (They include captain Linus Roache, co-pilot Jason Butler Harner, and flight attendants Michelle Dockery and Lupita Nyong’o, who has precious little to do in a role she clearly filmed before anyone had seen “12 Years a Slave.”) Then someone dies right on schedule, and it’s Marks who has their blood on his hands. (In the movies, every seat is an Economy Comfort seat.) Here, we’re on board a British Aqualantic 767 bound for Heathrow, and it comes equipped with a crew whose members, all too plausibly, initially dismiss the threatening messages as a hoax.
One of the consistent pleasures of airplane movies, at least for frequent flyers, lies in seeing the fictional airline names and logos dreamed up by movie production designers, along with the simulated aircraft themselves, their rows and aisles invariably enlarged to accommodate the camera’s passage. In a sure sign of our inflationary times, “Flightplan’s” criminal mastermind only asked for a mere $50 million.
By 10 minutes in, the movie is airborne, and by 15, Marks has received the first in a series of anonymous text messages (sent over the plane’s secure network) stating that someone on board will be killed every 20 minutes until $150 million is transferred into a designated bank account. The only real surprise: not a priest or a nun anywhere in sight. Collet-Serra then plows through the other scene-setting details in similarly expedient fashion, introducing an “Airport”-worthy cast of passengers that includes a frazzled businesswoman (Julianne Moore), a tough New York cop (Corey Stoll), a thirtysomething slacker dude (Scoot McNairy), a Muslim doctor (Omar Metwally) just waiting to be racially profiled, and the de rigueur unaccompanied minor.
When we first see Marks, sitting in his car outside JFK on a rainy, wintry day, the bottle of Jim Beam in his hand tells us he’s a man with a troubled/tragic past that will inevitably come home to roost somewhere around the movie’s third act. There, Peter Sarsgaard was the seemingly benevolent air marshal who turned out to be a raging psycho intent on turning the plane into a giant WMD here, someone who perhaps saw that movie is trying to frame Neeson’s Bill Marks to appear the same way. Richardson, Chris Roach and Ryan Engle, also bears more than a glancing resemblance to 2005’s “Flightplan,” in which Jodie Foster’s grieving widow becomes convinced that someone has kidnapped her young daughter in the middle of a transatlantic jumbo-jet flight. But the script, credited to tyro scribes John W. It’s easy to imagine that “Non-Stop” was pitched as “’Unknown’ on an airplane,” with Neeson once again spending most of the running time trying to convince people that he is who he says he is - in this case, the federal air marshal trying to root out a hijacker, as opposed to being the hijacker himself.