FLIGHTPLAN

I would never authorise the spending of $55million on a film with such an absurd plot as this one.  Which just goes to prove that (shock horror) I wouldn't make a very good film executive, given that this Jodie Foster thriller was a big commercial success.

The basic setup is one that has been used before, in for example Hitchcock's 'The Lady Vanishes' and the later 'So Long At The Fair', in which somebody disappears but everyone other than the protagonist denies that the missing person exists.

Here the missing person is Jodie Foster's daughter, which adds extra emotional tension, and the setting is a plane journey from Berlin to New York.

Until the last act I was happily going along with all this.  Foster is excellent as always in conveying the intensity of a mother whose daughter has somehow disappeared and who is confronted by fellow passengers saying that they didn't notice she had a daughter with her, or flight crew saying that her daughter never even boarded the plane.

Foster's husband has recently died and in fact his dead body is in a casket in the hold.  Things really take a surreal turn when the captain (Sean Bean, not playing a working-class type for once) tells Foster that her daughter in fact died with her husband.

Is Foster going mad? Has the film played fast and loose with us, and the scenes with the daughter were only in her head?  

Whilst I am chewing over these questions we get my favourite scene, one between Foster and Greta Saatchi as a therapist, in which we really feel Foster's grief, and her doubts as to her sanity.  The scene ends with a nice call-back to 'The Lady Vanishes', when Foster realises that she is not in fact going crazy and that her daughter really is somewhere on board.

After that the film goes progressively downhill, as it becomes an out-and-out thriller.  

I always had a nagging doubt as to whether the screenwriter could somehow come up with a satisfactory explanation for how the daughter disappeared, and why no one remembers seeing her.

And sure enough he can't - the entire plot hinges on the absurd idea that the main bad guy, a marshal also on board (played by Peter Sarsgaard) would stake everything on no one seeing the daughter before he and his accomplice, a stewardess, can somehow kidnap her.

This is so ridiculous that it seems unnecessary to point out other implausibilities, like the marshal relying on Foster deciding to look for her daughter in her husband's casket - here I thought maybe the screenwriter could have come up with a more dramatic and believable way in which he might get her to do this.

Other problems are that Sarsgaard is not a particularly memorable villain, and that Foster   cottons on to what is happening absurdly quickly at a key moment towards the end.

By this stage I was confused as to what was happening outside the plane now that it has landed, and the whole thing fizzles out with some fairly generic and uninteresting cat-and-mouse action in the plane.  

And then we get the final bit of nonsense: Foster deliberately setting off a bomb on the plane confident somehow that it won't do too much damage.

So a thumbs down from me, despite Foster's performance. But then again what do I know?

RATING: ✓ If You've Nothing Better To Do