"'Flight' Pain"
by Scott Mantz

"Flightplan"
Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard
Directed Robert Schwentke

Nightmare at 37,000 feet!  Jodie Foster will do anything to find her daughter in "Flightplan"

With a resume that includes critically acclaimed hits like 1988’s “The Accused,” 1991’s “The Silence of the Lambs,” and 2002’s “Panic Room,” it’s safe to say that two-time Oscar-winner Jodie Foster makes extremely entertaining movies that also happen to be smart and sophisticated.

What a shame that “Flightplan” isn’t one of them.  But it was for a little while, which is all the more reason why it ends up being such a colossal disappointment.  Despite a mysterious, intensely paced set-up that effectively utilizes post-9/11 paranoia, Foster’s latest suspense thriller veers way off course with a weak motive, an absurd climax and plot holes big enough to fly a 747 through.

Foster plays Kyle Pratt, an emotionally devastated widow on an international flight to New York with her daughter and the casket of her dead husband.  About 3 hours into the flight, Kyle is jolted from her nap to find that her daughter is missing.  The flight crew makes a half-hearted attempt to find her, but no one can claim to have seen her and she doesn’t even show up on the passenger manifest.  Since no one believes her story, Kyle has no choice but to take matters into her own hands if she ever hopes to see her daughter alive again.

Terror flies the unfriendly skies for the second time in as many months, but where Wes Craven’s “Red Eye” was a fun, straightforward psychological thriller, Robert Schwentke’s “Flightplan” is a darker, more stylish paranoid thriller that feeds directly into the anxieties that have been percolating since 9/11.  At one point, more than a few people cast a suspicious eye towards a group of middle-Eastern passengers boarding the plane, which makes them easy targets once Kyle’s mystery begins to unfold.  Setting the action aboard a nighttime flight only underscores the ominous mood, while periodic jolts of turbulence maintain the intensity.

The problem is that after such a well-executed set-up, the film flies straight into a brick wall when the true motive behind the mystery is finally revealed.  Not only is it too weak to be justified, but it’s too generic to be impressive and too far-fetched to hold up under scrutiny.  And for a premise that’s already somewhat similar to last year’s Julianne Moore thriller “The Forgotten,” the film practically turns into an airborne version of “Panic Room,” whose glaring similarities to “Flightplan” are hard to ignore.

That’s not to say that Foster doesn’t give it her all – in fact, she goes above and beyond the call of duty with a physically and emotionally grueling performance that never makes her anything less than deeply engaging.  But one can’t help but get the impression that she just played this role – the frantic, over-protective mother – in “Panic Room.”  And even though she plays a propulsion engineer, it seems highly unlikely that she would know more about the plane than the people actually flying it.

Acclaimed character actor Peter Sarsgaard plays the Air Marshall who is forced to keep the peace between Foster and the increasingly worried passengers, but the moment he appears on screen, you know it’s only a matter of time before his true motive is revealed.  And when that happens, the movie falls apart, and all the good quality filmmaking that came before it goes right out the window.  That’s too bad, since what started off as yet another entertaining Jodie Foster movie turns out to be neither smart nor sophisticated.

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