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PLOT: A recently widowed flight engineer and her little daughter get on a plane going from Berlin to New York, but somewhere mid-flight the child just vanishes. Is her daughter missing, or is the woman undone by grief?
One expects a bit of red herring in any good mystery story. That fishy smell surrounding Flightplan, however, is flounder.
Jodie Foster stars in Flightplan as a flight engineer and recent widow. She and her six-year old-daughter are leaving Berlin and returning to the United States to live. The movie begins in a grey and muted fashion, full of images bound to inspire dread -- a deserted train, a gleaming black casket, an empty bench in the garden, covered in snow. Some of it is real, some imagined, but it's all about mourning. The sense of dread is frankly delicious.
That uneasy feeling -- sign of a successful thriller, of course -- continues as Foster and her little girl go through the airport and as they board a cavernous new airbus.
Initially, they are almost alone on this massive, high-tech, vaguely futuristic aircraft and it's wildly creepy.
Once the flight is underway, Foster has a nap. When she wakens, her daughter is gone from her seat.
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Concern. Worry. More worry. Fear. Panic.
Increasingly distraught, Foster searches the plane for her child. When she starts to get hysterical, the air marshall (Peter Sarsgaard) steps in.
Together, they involve the pilot (Sean Bean). What follows is a lot of searching in small places, a nice claustrophobic touch. No trace of the child is found.
Did she even get on the plane? Is this all a figment of Foster's imagination? And if there is a child, and if she is missing, who is responsible, and why?
What do the half-dozen Arabs on the flight have to do with this, anyway? Why does Foster believe she'd seen some of them before? What the heck happened to this obvious extra twist in the story -- introduced but then never developed?
What happens in Flightplan is that the story turns on a really convenient dime and just grinds to a halt. It stops making sense. That's a polite way of saying it gets really stupid. It's such a huge cheat in logic and storytelling that we're getting all furious again just thinking about it. Too bad, because nobody does scared-but-determined better than Jodie Foster, and she's owned that turf since The Silence Of The Lambs. She's wasted here -- all that subtle work getting an audience on-side emotionally, and for nothing.
Flightplan is a big disappointment. People are calling it Panic Room at 30,000 feet, but it's not that good. If you've seen the ads for Flightplan, by the way, you've pretty well seen the whole movie; feel free to quit while you're ahead.
BOTTOM LINE: Jodie Foster is good, as usual. This psychological thriller is very promising for about 40 minutes, but then a big hole appears in the middle of the storytelling. What happened? We'll guess somebody somewhere made a bad decision.
(This film is rated PG)