It seems that scrabbling around her swanky house as she played a tense game of cat and mouse with a trio of robbers rubbed off a bit on Jodie Foster, because after her nail biting ordeal in David Fincher’s Panic Room, she went and essentially did it again – this time on an airplane. To paraphrase that old Die Hard 2 quote, you may be wondering how can the same shit happen to the same woman twice, but then Foster has never really been the sort of actress to trade in soft and fluffy roles seeing as she also endured the harrowing The Accused and scored an Oscar for facing down Hannibal Lecter. Maybe dragging Kirsten Stewart around a house away from Jared Leto’s cornrows gave her a taste of action genre and she fancied giving it another try, but whatever the reason, she fixed that wide-eyed, super-stressed facade onto her face once more for Flightplan, a plane-based thriller that goes out of its way to keep Foster’s horrified visage front and centre for an entire film. In the event of frantic decompression, try to breathe deeply…
Berlin-based American aviation engineer Kyle Pratt has been going through the wars recently, not only has her husband recently died after a fall, but she has to get her young, traumatised daughter, Julia, on a plane to the States for his burial. Getting on a flight can be stressful at the best of times, but when you have a pale, silent little girl in tow matters become a little more delicate, but matters are helped by the fact that even though her late husband is riding in the cargo hold, the rest of the huge, double decker plane (that Kyle helped design) is relatively comfortable as the pair are first to board.
The flight takes off without a hitch and after a while, Kyle dozes off and dreams the sort of uncomfortable dreams a recently widowed wife presumably has; but upon waking she finds that Julia is nowhere to be seen. She searches, naturally, but after wandering around both levels and the bar (seriously, the plane is huge), panic naturally starts to set in when her search turns up no daughter. The crew seem confused, the passengers don’t give a shit and Kyle is suddenly dealt a massive psychological blow when the staff inform her that not only does no one remember seeing her get on the plane with a child, but the passenger manifest shows no record of a Julia Pratt ever having set foot on board.
Exploding into full-blown mama bear mania, Kyle accuses everyone within earshot of being part of some conspiracy against her, but the harder she pushes, the more everyone is adamant that she’s a widow who is having a grief-fueled episode. With Captain Marcus Rich, sky marshal Gene Carson and various members of the flight crew contining to insist that Kyle is hallucinating, her resolve starts to shake – did she come on board with a child, or has the death of her husband and – allegedly – her daughter sent her completely over the edge?
I don’t mean to come at Flightplan so flippantly, but Panic Room-on-a-plane is basically the perfect way to sum up Robert Schwentke’s Fincher-esque excuse for Jodie Foster to give her temple veins and tear ducts the workout of a lifetime. I say Fincher-esque because not only do you gave Foster emoting the shit through a fiendish puzzle box of a movie, but it’s shot in a super slick manner too that also slightly riffs on the psychosis aspect of Fight Club a teensy bit. However, despite the pedigree, at its core Flightplan proves to be one of those capable thrillers that sets an intriguing premise and then just prays that no one notices that you can boot all manner of holes in the plot the second you give it a moment of logical thought. However, if you suspend you disbelief, there’s a good chance that you’ll get the necessary amount of thrills and spills needed to enjoy this psycho thriller and it’s definitely worth it to witness the fact that Foster herself is obviously taking this movie ten times more seriously than anyone else in the production – and that includes the director and writer…
Foster has always been a dedicated actress, even when she was lip-synching her way through Bugsy Malone, and you feel like she’s always at her best whenever teetering extravagantly between being painfully, emotionally vulnerable and being a determined, 5 foot three inch warrior woman. Well, she certainly gets to do this here and arguably in the most unrestrained performance of her career, she proves to be fascinating to watch. While the actress does think to give the grieving Kyle Pratt at least one toe still stuck in reality, Foster seems deadset to turn the panic and tension in her face all the way up to eleven while still stopping short of going all out into Nicolas Cage style mania.
In fact, her performance feels much like the controlled intensity that Tom Cruise pumps out in waves during the first third of the original Mission: Impossible and at times you genuinely worry that she’s about to pop a damn aneurysm as she stares/glares at everyone with eyes absurdly glossy with fear-tears. Fascinatingly, the movie and Foster (which was written and filmed in a post 9/11 world), seems to not to give a toss whether Pratt is actually likable as her fear and anger leads her to do some pretty far-out shit. Having her accuse Arab passengers of being involved feels deeply uncomfortable and worse yet, the movie has he actually using her technical know how to scramble through the spacious innards of the absurdly gargantuan plane (it’s essentially a fucking city block with wings) to actually screw with the electrics to cause distractions. However, the fact that Foster is allowed to take her character to the edge of lunacy means that it’s really working hard to sell the fact that this all may be the result of her racing, medicated mind and it actually does a pretty good job to, but it does come at a price.
As a result of Foster’s take no prisoners performance, virtually every other cast member has to get the fuck out of her way, primarily to confuse their guilt or innocence with whatever’s happening. Is Sean Bean’s steely captain hiding something with his professionalism, is Peter Sarsgaard’s marshal giving something away eith every crack in his voice, does Eirka Christensen know more than she’s letting on? Everyone has to remain a one-dimensional simply to keep them leaping on and off the suspect list, but Foster’s more than capable of holding court. The real issue is that as a result, no one in the film is particularly sympathetic and even the passengers aggressively do not give a single shit about this woman in crisis and even – in the film’s most brutal moment – even gets a slow clap from everyone in her cabin when her determined behavior gets the plane rerouted.
An intriguing set-up and a powerhouse central performance keeps Flightplan on course for the most of its journey, but while watching Foster freak out as the “The Lady Vanishes” plot twists and turns, the fact that the end gets a bit too Die Hard and the film gets weirdly hateful with the supporting characters stops things from being anthing more than a standard 2000s thriller that barely sticks the landing. Still, we hoped you enjoyed flying with Gaslighting Airlines, I think you’ll find you had a pleasant flight.
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