No worries, no spoilers ahead. Unlike the guys on the radio blabbing to each other on our way to see the movie earlier this evening. At least they said to turn the radio off if you didn’t want the spoilers.

As it turns out they didn’t really spoil anything.

It’s easy being fond of airplane movies and both my wife and I have been looking forward to seeing Flightplan. Jodie Foster was dynamite in Silence of the Lambs, which might just have been the last film I saw her in.

In this film Foster doesn’t disappoint as a despondent, soon-to-be-hysterical woman who just lost her husband to terrible fall to his death. The plan is return him in the coffin back to America along with her daughter.

Once she gets aboard the plan she falls asleep with her daughter nearby. When she wakes up, her daughter is gone. She looks everywhere on the plane and gets increasingly concerned that she can’t find her. Add to the fruitless search the fact that nobody else saw her daughter? That seemed like quite a stretch to me. Like you have 400+ people and kids are drawn to kids, so how is nobody going to see this woman and her child getting on the plane? Yeah, they may have been the first to board but … still.

As you can imagine take away a child from her mother and then tell her she never came on the plane to begin with is going to result in momma bear going postal. Jodie Foster’s character non-coincidentally worked on airplane engines in Berlin, so she knows more than a few things about how planes operate. This knowledge serves her well in her frantic search for her daughter that everybody says never came aboard the plane.

As far as airplane flicks go, the first 2/3rd of Flightplan rate right up there with the best of them. The final third is where things start to come unravelled, unfortunately. Not so bad that it ruins the entire experience, but enough to taint it.. There is a drastic and premature twist.

As we left the theater, people were saying positive things about the movie. I thought the ending was decent but it’s too bad the twist couldn’t have come later as it definitely seemed unnatural where placed. As for plausibility? Well, I think I’m going to give up on putting that in the equation with movies any more. Everybody in Hollywood must think America is stoned out of their mind, completely without intellegence, or just plain doesn’t care about plotlines that makes real world sense.

So if you can put that aside you’ll probably walk out of this one feeling pretty good. Just sit back, fasten your seatbelt and enjoy the ride. Overall, Flightplan is a good ride with some turbulence. Grade: B-

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