‘Plane’ Review — Gerard Butler Confidently Sticks The Landing in Another B Flick
Imagine starting out as an actor at 27 in a dime a dozen horrors and romcoms, being hot shit for a year or two, and then, in your 50s, making questionable B movies on repeat for middle-aged dads with beer bellies cheering you on. That's Gerard Butler's career in a nutshell. If there's a truly masculine actor from the UK (besides Jason Statham, of course) whose talent is wasted on boilerplate beat-em-up features, it’s the Scotsman from This Is SPARTA! Yet Butler doesn’t seem to mind the typecasting all that much — or he just loves consistent, easy work. Either way, every once in a while, he hits the bullseye and delivers a cool action-thriller that doesn't drown instantly in mediocrity upon its release. Good news: Plane is one of those.
In Jean-Francois Richet's latest potboiler, Butler plays captain Brodie Torrance, a nice guy with a testosterone-affirming stubble, who flies third-tier routes because once he beat up a scumbag for being rude to his flight attendant. He's a widow with a young daughter in Hawaii, who he plans to visit on New Year's Eve after a seemingly routine flight. The first bad sign suggesting it won't go smoothly comes in the form of a prisoner, Gaspare (Mike Colter), who joins the crew last minute in the company of a police escort. Once they’re up in the sky, the weather turns worse than expected, and Torrance and his co-pilot need to do an emergency landing somewhere in the Philippines. They miraculously pull it off with only two casualties. But shit really hits the fan when they realize the island they crashed onto is run by mercenaries and militias who are more than pleased to take American hostages. Soon, Torrance and Gaspare team up to save the passengers and themselves before things take a turn for the worse.
Plane is a straightforward movie with very few twists to offer, but the trick to making it engaging lies in its execution. Richet hasn’t made a ton of features, but he’s been in the game long enough to carry out a firm-handed and well-paced effort. After a comfortable (but effective) exposition, the suspense begins to brew as we watch Torrance handle a panic-inducing situation. Combining scenes of electronic malfunction and human desperation allows the director to sketch out the characters just enough to empathize with them on a surface level. Despite Torrance's confident approach in a heated moment, chaos ensues among the passengers, and before long, we become part of the experience — rooting for Butler and all his pseudo-flying skills to save us from a lethal catastrophe. He does just that, and from that point on, we trust him unconditionally. But things only truly kick in gear once we land.
The film’s depiction of violence is surprisingly uncompromising and gory. The brutality brought on by the island’s militia is cruel enough to confirm how far this B flick is willing to go. We're talking innocent people getting shot, throat-cutting, and beheading in guerrilla style (even if most of it takes place offscreen). So the rule of kill or be killed applies as quickly as it should. Richet creates an atmosphere in which things can go really awry, and when they do, no blood, teeth, or body parts are spared. Thus when we witness the first uncomfortably ferocious hand-to-hand combat between Butler and a bloodthirsty soldier, we have no doubt that the R rating will be fulfilled thoroughly.
In the end, though, everything comes down to Butler's dedication and charisma to carry this ride from beginning to end. Mike Colter's quiet yet dominant performance as Gaspare helps, too, especially when the two become a dynamic death squad, slaughtering their way out of the steamy jungle. But what elevates this picture from the Scotsman’s other similar roles is his character's vulnerability and endurance. Torrance isn't indestructible and almost gets his ass handed to him a few times. He's genuinely shaken by the dreadful cruelty (both physically and mentally), which makes him a relatable, self-sacrificing human being rather than an ordinary action hero — and the final shot of him taking in everything he just went through is a genuinely sincere sentiment that Plane leaves us with.
This week, I also wrote a feature over at Looper about ten exciting upcoming movies directed by actors like Taylor Kitsch, Michael B. Jordan, and Kristen Stewart. Check it out.
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