In today’s day and age, big budget action films dominate the box office. Wowing the audience with violence, CGI, and outlandish heroic feats, they seem to always bring in raving reviews and satiate the viewers need for a just resolution. But in Plane, one doesn’t need to be an expert to see that in writing this film doesn’t satisfy.
Plane, directed by Jean-François Richet, is an action thriller film that revolves around the pilot Brodie Torrance (Gerard Butler) who has to crash land his commercial flight in a militia-controlled island off of the Philippines and band together with a convicted killer (Mike Colter) to save themselves and the flight passengers who are being held hostage for a ransom. There is also a subplot revolving around the airline attempting to rescue the passengers while saving face with airline owner, Hampton (Paul Ben-Victor). At the same time, a PR rep named Scarsdale (Tony Goldwyn) hires a team of mercenaries for a rescue mission. However, there is a lot of plot buildup for very little payoff and an anticlimactic ending that leaves much to be desired. While the idea seems to be interesting, the execution is so poor that it loses all entertainment value and instead just becomes a movie of flat characters and little of the promised thrill.
To start, one of the biggest problems is with the characterization of the two main characters, pilot Brodie Torrance and Louis Gaspare.
Brodie Torrance is a heroic character with no flaws which made him static and one-dimensional. The film starts out explaining that his wife died a few months back and he has been spending time taking on more flights while his daughter is in Hawaii, waiting for him to come back for New Years. But the rest of the film paints him as a devoted father just trying to go back, leaving the audience to wonder why he would have abandoned his daughter in the first place? His background was never fully fleshed out and for unknown reasons he has an array of martial arts and combat skills, despite only being a pilot. His Scottish background and anger issues are also the pillar of his “underdog” story despite the fact that his accents oscillate between American and “Scottish” at random times throughout the film. His heroic image also establishes a sense of being the “white savior” in the situation throughout the movie. Torrance is portrayed as the one taking it upon himself to save everyone with almost no difficulty against a band of violent island natives but time and time again in the movie, he has to be saved from danger by Louis Gaspare who does most of the grunt work to save the passengers.
Louis Gaspare, as aforementioned, is a convicted killer who is on the plane for a prison transfer. Though Mike Colter is a good actor, and at some points Gaspare is the most entertaining character in the movie, his characterization was nothing short of problematic. The film attempts to portray him as someone who was only “in the wrong place at the wrong time”, and killed someone at 18, but then immediately he is shown to be willing to commit multiple acts of violence and aggression for no other reason than convenience. This characterization also leads to a negative perception of felons as primarily violent people who, when given the chance, will always revert back to hostility and brutality. Gaspare’s character also has a background that seems to have been thrown together by a monkey with a dartboard. It’s a nonsensical story haphazardly put together in order to try and give depth to Gaspare in a story rife with one-dimensional characters. This includes Gaspare himself as the given backstory falls short of providing viewers with any sense of sympathy or feeling for Gaspare connected to his past.
Plane is also riddled with stereotypical representations of the people within it. For instance, the co-pilot of the plane, Samuel Dele (Yoson An) plays a significant role in landing and fixing the plane, but as soon as he serves his usefulness in helping Torrance get the passengers to safety, his character loses screen time and drifts off into the background. All of the black characters within the film including the convict Louis Gaspare, Officer Knight (Otis Winston) who was in charge of transporting him for extradition, and Shellback (Remi Adeleke), a mercenary hired by the airline company to rescue the passengers of the crashed plane, all serve violent roles that merely facilitate Torrance’s acts of heroism. There were also no women who make significant impacts on the happenings of the plot and the only two significant female character are a flight attendant named Bonnie (Daniella Pineda) who helps take care of the passengers before being taken hostage, and Torrance’s daughter Daniela (Haleigh Hekking) who is only seen in a few scenes worrying about her father from afar. So, it’s safe to say that this movie does not pass the Bechdel test. The leader of the militia, Junmar (Evan Dane Taylor), is also depicted as ruthless, objectifying the stranded passengers for his own financial benefit which creates a negative characterization of Filipino peoples, making them seem like violent killers who only want power. While there was an attempt in the film to make him seem more dimensional through the facing of loss, it was very unnecessary and didn’t really line up with the plot.
The title itself, Plane, also shows a lack of originality and cohesivity with the plot, given the lack of significance and prevalence of the plane in the majority of the story. The plane is featured in the opening and closing of the film, but the brunt of the action happens off the plane. The plane itself serves more as a facilitator for the actual conflict, which is trying to escape the militia. It’s as if a movie about violence within a school was called “Bus”. The title even gives viewers the idea that this specific plane could be vital to the events of the film, when in reality, the harbinger of danger is the storm they must fly through in the beginning; it could have been any plane that led them to where they were and didn’t need to be this specific one. If anything, we can say with certainty that most people are tired of singular noun titles. Give us a little razzle dazzle. Show us that you care.
Overall, when it comes to the plot of Plane, one can see that they didn’t stick the landing. Other films have been there before and done it better. Viewers shouldn’t waste their time with this latest action thriller unless using it for nothing more than background noise.
2/5 Stars