While Taken certainly has the bragging rights for making Liam Neeson a late-career action star, you really can’t under-sell the efforts of director Jaume Collet-Serra who did more than his fair share of keeping the former Bryan Mills active between sequels. In 2011, the filmmaker wiped his memory and dumped him in Berlin for Unknown, but in 2014, both Neeson and Collet-Serra released Non-Stop – a film that saw the aging action star looking just as bewildered and bamboozled as ever, but this time on the confines of a plane.
Expect tense phone calls, brawls in confined spaces, numerous references to 9/11 and more smokescreens that you can wave a plane at as Liam once again plays a flawed hero forced to redeem himself before everybody dies. But while Non-Stop is as massively far-fetched as you’d believe, you’d be amazed how much a movie can get away with if everyone involved manages to stick the landing…
Grizzled U.S. Air Marshal Bill Marks lumbers onto his latest flight with a sense that this man is incredibly world weary. In fact, this is soon proven when, after suffering the uncomfortable nature of take off, he sneaks away to the toilets to puff on a smoke and indulge in the full-blown alcoholism that’s over taken his life. However, while he grinds away at his meaningless existence, the rapport he manages to spark up with frequent flyer, Jen Summers, is quickly ruined when his secure phone buzzes to life and delivers a disturbing message that threatens to kill a passenger every 20 minutes unless $150 million is deposited into a specified bank account.
The only other person who should be able to send messages to him is the other Marshal on board the plane, but after confronting him it seems that Bill hasn’t managed to keep his secret boozing that much of a secret as his colleague utterly dismisses his suspicions. Additionally, after he brings his fears to both the plane’s flight crew and his superiors on the ground, Marks is met with similar skepticism and soon even finds that he could be being framed for some terrible event that’s about to happen. For a start, that mysterious bank account turns out to be in Bill’s name, and worse yet, the 20 minute death prophecy comes true when Marks is forced to neutralise the other Marshal in secret after discovering he’s up to something screwy.
In well and truly deep with a terrorist plot that’s pointing every finger at him, Bill has to conduct his own makeshift investigation while the suspicion from the passengers and crew reaches explosive levels. Can Bill shrug off his flaws long enough to discover who in a passenger list of shifty individuals is mounting this conspiracy, and can he do it before the have-a-go-heroes in his midst finally make a stand and try and take him down? No frequent flyer mileage is worth this…
There are many ways to read into the title of Non-Stop. One could be that the flight itself is non-stop to its destination, and another could be that the thrills of a mid-air conspiracy means that the tension is also non-stop, but if you were to ask me, I’d suggest that the sheer amount of ridiculous plot twists Collet-Serra and Neeson expect you to swallow within a 107 minute period hits you at an unending rate that aggressively earns that title, logic be damned. In a lot of ways, Non-Stop settles into becoming the perfect template for virtually all the Neeson/Collet-Serra collaborations that occurred which spices things up by trying to make virtually everything that occurs some sort of gasp inducing twist. Even the rather basic fact that Bill isn’t actually a normal passenger and is, in fact, an Air Marshal isn’t laid out clearly at the start and instead is dropped on us after we already know that he’s a man stripped of all hope. But while it’s obviously good practice for any thriller to keep it’s audience off balance, the filmmakers seem to be so eager to keep rocking the boat and reformatting that fragile status quo, that soon it’ll have you questioning every single thing that happens.
For the most part, it’s great – but only if you just let yourself be pulled along by the strong current of bullshit the movie employs to keep the plot surging onward. It’s obviously to the benefit of the story that you question the things that are occuring around our beleaguered and exhausted looking lead, but Collet-Serra seens dead set on having you in a constant state of bewilderment in order to match what poor old Bill is going through. Thanks to numerous tricks like a character holding a suspicious look or delivering an unconvincing explanation, at some point, you genuinely that literally everyone could be potentially be in on this as your brain flips through them like a hyper-paranoid game of Guess Who.
But while the film may hold you it’s grasp for most of its duration, this eventually leads to the unavoidable result of realising at some point that the whole thing is about as logical and realistic as an episode of Ren & Stimpy. Basically, how you ultimately view Non-Stop depends on how much you enjoy the rampant silliness. It certainly helps that Neeson sells it like he’s in fucking Sicario, as he grunts, growls and strong-arms his way through an increasingly hostile plane with his usual balance of leathery machismo and self loathing pathos. Say what you will about the actor’s action phase but he convinces, be it tenderly returning a lost teddy to a wide eyed child, to savagely beatling seven shades of shit out of anyone he believes is part of this conspiracy. Similarly, Collet-Serra has amassed a surprisingly starry cast that’s so stacked, it feels it can afford to give a pre-Black Panther Lupita Nyong’o a weird, Dick Van Dyke, cockney accent and then utterly waste her in a nothing role. However, the rest of the cast do a good job of having you have no clue who is actually behind the central plot. Julianne Moore somehow both phones it in and keeps you guessing chiefly because you’re not sure why she’d sign on to a Neeson action flick in the first place, while other faces such as Downton’s Michelle Dockery, Corey Stoll, Scoot McNairy, Anson Mount, Corey Hawkins and Linus Roache all take care to leave more than enough doubt in their performances to keep you bamboozled. Of course, the film uses some tried and true techniques familiar with any modern plane-set thriller – the addition of a Middle Eastern passenger to create xenophobic dissection is regrettable and Collet-Serra can’t resist going all in on a crash landing in order to ensure a big finish that includes a zero-G standoff; but while Non-Stop is legitimately fun while it lasts, the come down is admittedly little ropey…
Willing to sacrifice itself on the alter of dumb to ensure that it’s rarely dull, Non-Stop delivers fun, Neeson-led thrills as it has you frenziedly accusing the entire cast as some point. But once those wheels have finally touched down on the tarmac, you’ll be surprised at how little of the experience has actually stayed with you. Thank you for flying Air-Neeson, you won’t remember the experience.
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