Xtreme Vogue Islamabad Desk: Sidra Yusuf
Star Cast: Gerard Butler, Mike Colter, Yoson An & ensemble.
Director: Jean-François Richet
What’s Good: Gerard Butler is in full form as he ticks marks all the boxes to be an action star.
What’s Bad: The movie stuck in some random time zone decides to not delve deeper into its subject at all. A lucrative meal wasted.
Loo Break: There is intense action but you will still know your hint to take one.
Watch or Not?: Only if Gerard Butler is your man crush and you can see the makers deceive him with a half-hearted film.
Language: English (with subtitles).
Available On: Lionsgate
Runtime: 107 Minutes
User Rating:
A skilled pilot begins a flight with some unconventional passengers on board. Midway the flight gets struck by lightening and loses its control. The emergency landing takes them from one hell to another as they land in a war-torn country where they must thrive hard to survive
Script Analysis
The beauty of survival dramas is always more in the setup than the people involved. The attention is obviously on the characters that are on both sides of the coin, but a filmmaker needs to explore where they stand and what the politics of that place has to offer. Like in 1917. It is a nameless land but the story of that place impacts the storyline in more than one good way and creates a three-dimensional world where it is not just about the protagonist surviving, but the ecosystem revealing itself too.
Plane that stars the amazing Gerard Butler as its leading man, relies a whole lot just on its casting coupe. Written by Charles Cumming (screenplay, story) and J.P. Davis (screenplay), the movie by the introduction and entry into the story is interesting. A flight with fourteen people, one of which is a top-order agent with a high-profile criminal accused of a homicide. When the flight gets hit by a thunderbolt, all of these are panicked to save their lives. I told you, interesting.
But the real problem begins when the introduction is done and the task now is to explore this plot and try to juice out as much as they could. But sad to report, the makers do none. It is a thriller about a flight emergency landing into a war zone where bloodthirsty vigilantes are running loose on the streets. We are never really told where exactly this place is, or what the war is about, or why even these guys are so raged that they don’t even think twice before killing a woman they haven’t even ever seen in the blink of an eye.
Rather the movie resorts to the commercial Hollywood traits of setting hand-to-hand combat, a rescue sequence, a larger-than-life plane flying stunt, and more. These troops never feel enough after the first combat. Because we have already seen enough of this, give us something more, something fresh, something that is unique about your story and not look like picked from hundred others.
Star Performance
Gerard Butler invests the most in the movie. The actor plays the antagonist with conviction and you can see his prep in the very first 15 minutes when he is on the flight. The actor sheds his stardom and becomes that pilot effortlessly. In the movie to follow he embodies the patent Hollywood action star who saves the day and gets shot by a bullet right in the end. While the movie fails to give him a better playground, he doesn’t let that affect his game at least.
Rest everyone gets paper-thin parts that make little to no substantial impact at all.
Direction, Music
Jean-FrançoisRichet.’s direction is as generic as it gets. He manages to create some intrigue with some twists and turns, but other than that there hardly anything out of the box here. He chooses to keep everything surface level without wanting to dig deeper and create a very alluring tale.
DOP Brendan Galvin tries his best to capture this world and tell a story with his frames but the base is not strong enough to support him.
The Last Word
Plane could have been a winner if everyone was as dedicated as Gerard Butler, but turns out everyone chose to rely on him rather than support him.
Plane Trailer
Plane releases on 13th January, 2023.
