Plane (2023)

After having the best part of a week film-free, battering through the latest new year tv streaming offerings, I thought it was probably about time I caught up with myself and having a couple of days off and a list as long as my arm to be going on with, I thought I'd better crack on.

And this seemed as good as anything currently on my desk worth having a butcher's at. Can't beat a bit of Butler, am I right? I was guessing it probably wouldn't be high art, but then again I probably wouldn't be in the front of the queue to watch him playing Hamlet. He is a pretty safe pair of hands, even if they are only rarely demanding.

Whilst never becoming a pilot, I do have experience of being on a mostly empty flight out of South East Asia. Thankfully it was nowhere near as lively as this admittedly short trip at 37000 feet. Hot towels and snoring, really.

I was initially put in mind of the good old days of regular feature-length terrifying disasters of the seventies and eighties when the average viewer got on a plane maybe once every couple of years and Leslie Nielsen made a lot of money taking the mickey out of them.

These were a staple of cinema-going at the time, but are much less prevalent in this modern day and age where you might hop on a plane for a tenner, just to save yourself a couple of hours going from one end of the country to the other because you couldn't be arsed to drive and a bus or train was probably more expensive.

This is entirely what it says on the tin and it doesn't say much, but really, it's still all you need. If anything, it is a little bit misleading as for the much larger portion of the film, it isn't spent on the plane itself. It's about a plane though, right?

The performances are fine and everything you should expect from a project whose main feature is a big metal tube. Butler's pilot is a genuinely decent, if somewhat naïve, chap and the not overlong story skips along at decent enough pace. Average support takes nothing away from our leads ability to carry the film. A true no-brainer in not the best sense, with an unsatisfactorily dull first half, but this livens up later when our hero and his convenient sidekick really have to start meting out their form of mighty justice. Far from great, but could have been much worse.