Tanya Batson-Savage, Freelance Writer
Jodie Foster fights to find her daughter in the movie Flightplan. - CONTRIBUTED
FLIGHTPLAN, STARRING Jodi Foster, is one of those movies where the acting is far stronger than the plot. In particular, in this case, the performance of Foster, may be a relatively small woman but remains an actor of big parts.
Directed by Robert Schwentke and written by Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray, Flightplan plays its strength on the passion of a woman who has lost her child without becoming all Lifetime-like about it. The film also features Sean Bean as Captain Rich and Peter Sarsgaard as Carson.
The role is somewhat similar to Foster's last stint out in Panic Room, but the plots of both flicks are reasonably different - even though once again there is very limited space to move about - so that one doesn't feel that they are back at the same film.
LOSING SOMETHING IMPORTANT
Foster plays Kyle Pratt, a bereaved woman who is on a flight from Berlin to the United States. While most people may worry about losing their luggage in transit, Pratt ends up losing something far more important. She loses her daughter at 30,000 feet.
Almost the entire film takes place on an aeroplane and for the most part what unravels is an involving suspense. This is quite credible because of Foster's performance, which drives most of the action. The beauty of Foster's performance works wonders for the film because for much of the movie one really cannot tell whether Pratt is really simply passionately committed to finding her child or whether she really is just a crazy woman running about a plane. As she careens from one end of the super double-decked carrier, however, one may not be able to help but notice that if she had not been a white woman causing such a disturbance in this post 9/11 era - when a Rastaman can be escorted off a plane because his image of Haile Selassie reminds a flight attendant of Osama Bin Laden - she would have been put down long ago. The film, to its credit, has the decency to allow the increased paranoia about Islamic men on an aeroplane to play into the plot.
Even so, Flightplan has several plot-hole problems that can cause some turbulence if your attention drifts to them. The truth is that creating a mystery in an aeroplane - even a very big aeroplane - is quite tricky and though Flightplan does a worthy enough job, it is far from perfect.
The shooting is tight and slick and geared toward either keeping us with Pratt's hysteria or aiding the psychological thriller aspect of the flick. The problem is that the latter is not so well written.
If like Passenger 57 it were merely action driven, then its job would have been simpler. Indeed, though the movie becomes much more action driven toward the end, even there it falls from grace, as the timing for the big finale is slightly off and becomes disappointing.
So Flightplan is a fairly good ride, but there is some turbulence which worsens toward the end.
