Plane review: Gerard Butler and Mike Colter fly the unfriendly skies
This film about a passenger jet that makes an emergency landing on a remote, hostile island is as plain as its title
Film Reviews Gerard
Deep thinkers from William Shakespeare to Samantha Fox have wondered “what’s in a name?” The producers of Plane have discovered that, if nothing else, the right title of a January action picture starring Gerard Butler can at least get people yapping on Twitter. Why is calling a movie Plane so funny? Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock wisely did not star in Bus. Is it the lack of a definite article? In 1964, director John Frankenheimer and star Burt Lancaster collaborated to make The Train and it remains a classic. Or could it be that Plane is just so … plain? Picture all the action movies, laid out like Chobani yogurt, and instead of mixing Clingstone Peach or Monterey Strawberry with your granola, you’re sticking with plain. Naming a movie Plane is funny. That’s all there is.
Anyway, Plane begins in an airport with Gerard Butler as Captain Something-or-other, belching exposition into his telephone (he loves his daughter, he wishes he was a better father since, well, something deeply traumatic happened) and promising that, “there won’t be any delays.” Guess what? There are going to be delays! That’s because our hero is flying for a rinky-dink airline on New Year’s Eve. There are very few passengers, so even though the Singapore to Tokyo trip has some dangerous weather, the bean-counter dispatcher won’t approve a re-route. Not worth the fuel costs! As such, Butler and his co-pilot (the charming Yoson An) are directed to pierce the South China Sea’s most dark and unfriendly skies. Their aircraft is struck by lightning, comms go down, and it’s looking like curtains for all.
But Gerard Butler is the best there is and he manages to get everyone to safety. Well, everyone who kept their seatbelt on. But once the plane is down, there’s a new set of issues. For starters, they’re in the middle of nowhere and unable to call for help in an area too vast to assume a typical rescue operation will find them. Also, one of the passengers (Mike Colter of Luke Cage) is a handcuffed convicted killer being extradited from Singapore to Toronto; if you’re sensing that he’s going to turn out to be a hero, your instincts are good. (This fella, Louis Gaspare, served for years in the French Foreign Legion. That means he’s basically the French Rambo, and calls Gerard Butler Capitaine.) But wait, there’s more! They aren’t just stranded in the middle of nowhere with a killer—they’re on a lawless island overrun by Filipino separatists. The government has basically abandoned the place, and if those nasty separatists aren’t above taking missionaries hostage for ransom, just what will they do with a plane full of rich North Americans and Europeans?
Such troubles! Luckily Gerard Butler, the working-class action hero, has killer instincts that his new buddy Colter quickly cultivates, and soon they’re knifing and sledge-hammering and doing Chuck Norris-style damage to all the baddies. And happily for everyone who buys a ticket to a movie called Plane hoping to see a lot of badassery on a plane, things do head skyward again. Indeed, the lead villain will eventually find himself kicked in the face by the titular plane. This is not a joke.
Periodically the action switches back to the airline’s headquarters, a cheesy 1980s-looking obsidian star chamber in a Manhattan skyscraper. Why a cheapo airline servicing Asian countries would have such offices is not explained, but luckily the CEO is played with weary “I shoulda stayed in bed” energy by well-traveled character actor Paul Ben-Victor. He calls in a cleaner named Scarsdale, played by Tony Goldwyn, who hunches over a speaker phone and barks lines like “the Philippines are not the Amalfi Coast!” Goldwyn does performers like Michael Ironside and Lance Henriksen proud in this, their shared tradition.
Is Plane good? Well, keeping in mind that critics don’t pay to see movies, yeah, sure, Plane is good. There’s a part where one guy fires a gun so powerful it blows a hole through an SUV and kills a guy on the other side. Also, viewers will learn how to say “chief” in Tagalog. (It’s “Datu.”) And, kidding aside, the plane crash sequence—which has some length to it—is tense and well-cut together. If you buy a ticket for this one, just know there’s no First Class option. But with moderate expectations, you’ll still get to your destination.
89 Comments
You know, I appreciate a writer willing to review a movie on its own dumb level and grade it as such. Nicely done, Jordan!
I don’t disagree but I’m still fairly surprised it was given higher than a D+.
I’m actually a little disappointed it wasn’t a D+. I was hoping reviews of this would either be a surprising A+, like a stupid but amazingly fun movie, or a D+ where it was just the worst shlock imaginable where you have to see it to believe it. Like, say, Moonfall (which the AV Club did give a D+ and I watched the whole dumb thing). I’m not sure these kinds of movies are watchable if they’re like a B-.
I finally saw this and it honestly is a perfect B- movie. Honestly maybe a B. It subverted a lot of my expectations on the margins in ways that elevated the pretty standard main plot.
I just saw this as well (finished about 15 minutes ago). For what it is, it does the job. Obviously there’s plenty ridiculous about it but you know what, it does its thing and then it’s over, and you don’t really want more out of a movie like this than that.
Yeah I think that’s the whole point of the Plane name. Basic high-concept “Die Hard on an island” thing (which is funny because we’re getting a rom-com spin on that too this year, with Shotgun Wedding.) They’re not trying to give you any ideas this is something trying to be more than a pulpy action movie (take notes, Netflix.)
“French Rambo” is a pretty cool title.
Rambeaux would have been better.
That sounds like a creamy sauce.
I wish they had to foresight to imagine this as a trilogy, and just name this one Air. Followed by Land and then Sea.
Train and Automobile were RIGHT THERE!
The second will be called “Sea Plane” and the third will be “Just Plane”. They rebooted in 2040 as “Plane$”.
Plane Jane
That was the brilliance of Violent Night. Its Die Hard (and Home Alone) with Santa. That’s it.I’m also 100% convinced that the movie came from somehow having the “Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?” argument and decided it, F it, let’s make a Die Hard Christmas movie.
Yes agreed, along with whatever reviews Leigh writes.
It’s almost like… the old AV Club…
Is anything in this film going to be better than the reveal of the title and the end of the trailer?(I have preview tickets before the UK release and I am really looking forward to it, but that trailer is spectacular).
Damn, missed this post before making my own. Yeah, that title reveal at the end of the trailer is hilarious. Such a great combination of laziness and the absolute minimum congruity with what’s shown in the trailer.
Incongruity is right, if the film were “Die Hard on a plane” I’d understand a little more but the action takes place across an island, they just *got* there by plane.I wonder if it were a deliberate choice for being memorably bad or they just got lucky.
“Die Hard on a plane” is Executive Decision and it’s the best non-Die-Hard Die Hard movie ever made.
How do these people always manage to crash someplace where “typical rescue operations can’t find them”? Do we need to maybe overhaul our rescue operations?
It does seem like these movies ought to be period pieces, at this point. “We’re hopelessly out of touch! No one will ever find . . . what? Oh, right, GPS works without a signal. Search and rescue will be here in a couple of hours. Hey, let’s sit together watch those saved episodes of Wednesday on your iPad while we wait.”
I’m imagining what goes on at the typical search party:
“Well Cap, we looked everywhere we typically look. We found nothing.”
“Well, did you look here?” *points on map*
“No.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t typically look there.”
“Well maybe somebody should go look there!”
And they’d find like dozens of plane and boat wrecks and all these people like the Gilligan’s gang, the Lost people, Tom Hanks fucking a volleyball…
It’s important not to let the “searching” get too much in the way of the “partying.”
Are you Alia Shawkat?
Don’t shame Tom Hanks’ character in Cast Away. He and Wilson shared a moment. And it was a better love story than Twilight.
I’m not saying I could go 4 years on an island without nutting on whatever athletic equipment I became emotionally attached to.
Good point, there certainly wasn’t an airplane that was shot down less than a decade ago and took fucking MONTHS to find even a piece of the plane, right?
Planes disappear all the time. MH370 is still missing. I want to know how these people always survive a plane crash with little to no injuries.
And perfect hair
Because otherwise there’d be no movie.
“So the movie can happen” is one of my favourite ‘Pitch Meeting’ justifications.
Yeah yeah yeah!
I’m still wondering how they manage to take off again after crash landing.
Maybe French Rambo is also an ace mechanic.
I mean Maverick and Cock Rooster drove that elderly F-14 out of a garage and then parallel-parked it on the flight deck.
In Six Days, Seven Nights they were able to lash water things to the plane (I don’t know what they’re called, the things water planes have instead of wheels) because its original landing gear was broken in the crash. Then Harrison Ford and Anne Heche managed to push the plane into the ocean so it could take off.
But there’s a huge difference between a 4-passenger float plane and a 200+ passenger trans-Pacific jet. Those small planes are meant to be repaired by the owner.And those things are called pontoons.
lol Yeah I’m not telling you it makes any sense (I meant to convey that with the part about little bitty Anne Heche pushing the plane to the ocean). Just saying movies come up with ways to make this stuff happen.
They’d have to be pretty big plane-floaties to work on a jet that size and you’d need a LOT of Anne Heche’s pushing it.
Having just seen the movie, I will explain! Spoilers, I guess.They are able to take off because they don’t crash the plane, they land the plane on a (suspiciously level, wide, straight, and long) mining road in the jungle. The electrical system was out so they only had battery power, and that ran out before they landed. They tried to dump their fuel before landing but only the left-side tank was dumped; the right-side tank still has fuel. And partway through the movie the copilot repairs the electrical system. So even though the plane’s in rough shape, it’s still technically airworthy, and they manage to take off (while being shot at) and limp to another nearby island that isn’t populated by hostile militias.
I’m starting to think that maybe what we’ve all been reading as gen x dumb sarcasm might actually be you believing that movies are real. Spider, honey, no it’s because they’re telling a story that didn’t actually happen and it wouldn’t be interesting if they were just rescued.
Sure, cool. Next you’ll be telling me Top Gun wasn’t a documentary.
This sounds pretty dull compared to my pitch for Golden Agouti Gerbils On A Plane.
Richard Gere
and
Samuel L. Jackson !
It would have been all worthwhile just to hear Jackson say, “Aw, hell no, motherfucking powerbottoms on a motherfucking plane! And what’s with all these damn gerbils?”
Spartans on a Plane!
THIS . . . IS . . . PLANE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“Are you ENTERTAINED . . . on this plane?!”
“Go back to Fuckplaneistan!”
Mike Colter play a hot AF priest on Evil. What else do we need to know?As far as jets going down in hard to find places, a few years ago we lost one from Malaysia and it took forever to find just a few pieces of wreckage. It’s not that unusual.
I’m somewhat surprised the apparently French director didn’t get a Francophone for that role.
I bet that a lot of the separatists have names, personalities and back-stories! Can’t wait to hear something about their journeys and motivations.
Yeah, one of them crawled out of a Sarlacc pit and took over a criminal syndicate where he doesn’t kill people, levy tribute or pretty much anything criminal syndicates usually do.
Perhaps eventually one of his subordinates will explain to him that if you pay people, they will do things for you.
Most of their journeys turn out to be from “alive” to “filled with holes and no longer filled with blood”
“Is Plane good? Well, keeping in mind that critics don’t pay to see movies, yeah, sure, Plane is good.” maybe there’s still some life in the new av club. this is funny.
I’m sure it will be buried in Amazon ads and seven more articles about James Cameron shitting his pants before long. Never fear..
I will definitely see this because I can see a movie every day for free at the local theater we go to, and it looks like glorious B-movie garbage.
Followup: It is not glorious B-movie garbage. It is in fact the most straightforward movie I’ve ever seen. There are no twists, no surprises. Every single character and thing in the movie is exactly what it seems to be. Tony Goldwyn’s character does not turn out to be evil. The plane crash was not a sabotage job intended to kill Colter’s seemingly-bad-but-actually-innocent character who knows secrets that will take down powerful goverment officials. None of that! There are basically two dialogue scenes to establish some character traits of the two leads, and everything else in the movie is just plot mechanics.It’s tense and well-edited, but if you wanted a more plain, generic movie, good lucky finding one. This is the Movie that Otto from Repo Man watched while drinking his Beer and eating his Food.
I’m not going to see this movie, but I thoroughly enjoyed the review!
Butler’s name was Brodie Torrance when Torrance Brodie is clearly superior?
Is this set in the Dog or Train Cinematic Universe?
“ Why is calling a movie Plane so funny? Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock wisely did not star in Bus. Is it the lack of a definite article?”
Yep, must be the lack of a definite article, as evidenced by the Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock movie The Speed, right?
Butler yells over his phone…“THIS IS SPARTA… on THE PLANE!”Daughter on the other end of the phone…“See, that’s why I don’t talk to you anymore.”
Now we all know this should have been called Plane has Fallen
“Indeed, the lead villain will eventually find himself kicked in the face by the titular plane. This is not a joke.”
Well, what is it, because what you’ve described is literally not a thing that a plane can do.
I won’t pay to see this in theaters, but it seems like it’ll be a decent way to spend a couple of hours once it hits streaming.
Their aircraft is struck by lightning, comms go down, and it’s looking like curtains for all. This sound’s like Gilligan’s Island, with a plane instead of a boat.
Indeed, the lead villain will eventually find himself kicked in the face by the titular plane. This is not a joke.
This also sounds like Gilligan’s Island.
Why is calling a movie Plane so funny?Glad to know I’m not the only one who thought this. I only saw the trailer a few days ago, without knowing what film it was for, and when the title came up I lol’d. Seemed especially funny given that 80% of the trailer (and, I assume, the movie) is in fact not set on a plane, and seems to have very little to do with a plane.
Pretty much the only reason I clicked on this review was to make a comment ridiculing the name. Then I saw my work was already done in the review and ended up kind of wanting to see the damn movie.
Yeah, to be fair the movie itself looks pretty fun. Not quite worth a trip to the cinema, I think, but I’ll probably check it out when it arrives on streaming.
Plane.
That made me laugh.
Don’t planes get struck by lightning often? I didn’t think it was that dangerous.
It’s rinky dink, didn’t you see? RINKY DINK.
That’s what it sounds like when the lightning hits the plane, right?
Poor little tink tink.
Do you know what happen to a rinky-dink airline when it gets struck by lightning? The same thing that happens to everything else.
Not often, but it isn’t as devastating as it used to be.
The FAA estimates every plane in the US commercial fleet gets struck by lightning more than once per year. While it’s not exactly common, given the number of flights one plane will do in a year, it’s still thousands of lightning strikes per year. It should be completely harmless to a modern passenger plane like the one in the movie. There was a flight back in the late 60s where lightning caused a spark in a fuel tank that caused a catastrophic explosion and since then passenger planes have been redesigned to stop that from happening.I get that in movie this is supposed to be a shady airline that cuts corners on maintenance but I can’t see how even a lack of maintenance would make a lightning strike catastrophic. The lightning protection is basically the skin of the plane itself and intrinsic to it’s structure.
There are thousands of lightning strikes a year on commercial passenger planes. For instance, the FAA estimates every plane in the US fleet alone gets stuck by lightning at least once per year. For a modern passenger plane like the one depicted in the movie it should be completely harmless, even if the airline was skimping on maintenance. The lightning protection is basically the skin of the plane itself. The lightning travels over it and discharges off a wing or tail tip.
I look forward to the sequel, Peanut.
Sure the name is silly, but it’s still a bit too specific for my taste. I’m hoping that my spec script, “Movie”, will show people how it’s done.
This is a fun, down-to-earth review, thank you Jordan
You know, I’d be all for this if upon landing it turns out they’re on the same island as LOST.Oh well, maybe that’ll be the sequel: Boat.
Pass me another chunk of co-pilot.
Gerard Butler’s superpower is “managing expectations”.
This was the only thing I could think of when I saw the title of this movie: