Snakes on a Plane

dir: David R. Ellis
[img_assist|nid=820|title=There's the plane. There's the snake. And there's Samuel L. Jackson. Happy now?|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=390|height=293]
Of all the flicks that came out in 2006, this was by far the most pointless. That’s not the same as saying it was the worst. There were far worse films in that and every other year. It’s just that few of them managed to be this superfluous.

Do you ever think about how some films get made, or why, which is probably more relevant? In the main it’s easy to assume that the reason why any film gets made is for the money. Movie-making is a money-making enterprise; that goes without saying, which seems redundant since I just said it. But why the producers and studios decided to try to make money out of Snakes On a Plane is a mystery that only P.T. Barnum could explain to me.

I can’t figure out anything on that score past someone trying to profit from underestimating the stupidity of the movie-going public.

I mean, look at the title. Snakes on a Plane. What do you think the flick is about? Strawberry harvesters in the hilly regions of Provence just before WWII? A geisha’s coming of age during the Tokugawa Shogunate? Crop circles in Nebraska; the impact of divorce on a middle class Midwestern family; someone finding redemption by singing duets with benevolent green aliens found hiding in one’s underwear?

It’s about snakes on a plane, of course. As in, there’s a plane, and there’s snakes on it. How goddamn literal is that? At the very least the makers can’t be accused of false advertising. It’s not like they promise a plane and some snakes, and it really ends up being My Dinner With Andre; where two pretentious gits wax lyrical for two goddamn hours, with not a snake or a plane in sight.

Maybe that would have improved My Dinner with Andre; having a large group of species-diverse snakes each choose a part of Wallace Shawn’s body to chow down on, or watching a plane flown into the restaurant by radical fundamentalist snakes at the half hour mark. All for those 72 snake virgins in Paradise, mmm.

Maybe a little of Dinner with Andre would have improved Snakes, because, as it is, it’s a pretty dull and dumb movie.

Samuel L. Jackson looks embarrassed to be in this movie as the protagonist, and so he should. He gets to deliver lines of dialogue so stupid in their writing and intent that I hope the fortune he got paid to star in this turd covers his mattress sufficiently to allow him to keep warm at night.

The diabolical script wouldn’t be so bad if the movie managed to be cheesy and funny, or scary and action-packed, or even mildly entertaining, but it manages to artfully sidestep any and all of those adverbs and adjectives.

A surfie moron (Nathan Phillips) witnesses a murder, and is taken into protective custody. He needs to be transported via plane, and it’s up to Flynn (Jackson) to protect him from whatever transpires.

But who could have guessed that the bad guys have a cunning plan in the form of smuggling hundreds of snakes on board The Plane? I mean, these guys are criminal masterminds, after all.

When the snakes come out to play, people on the plane start dying quite rapidly from the effects of CGI snakes biting their genitalia, arses, faces and boobs. Most of the action involves Flynn finding improvised ways to deal with the snakes, from aerosol can flamethrowers to colourful language, or encouraging people to work together, or to buy timeshares in Far North Queensland.

Jackson seems as bored as the audience is throughout. I guess it’s hard to emote to characters more fake and insubstantial than the CGI snakes around him. Since he worked on the last three George Lucas films, he should be used to it by now.

What he and the makers give us is a dull, dull time to sit through. Ignoring the idiocy of the plot, if the action had been handled in a decent way, if it had the spark of wit or sly charm required to carry this stuff off, it could have worked. But what it remains is uninspired and mishandled.

There are films with similar scenarios that work, even on the dumb action level. Con Air was pretty entertaining. Jackson himself was great in another monster flick, Deep Blue Sea, and gets that great speech at the perfect moment in the film. Snakes stumbles and mumbles its way through the story, realising at the halfway point that it has run out of plot and ideas, so it repeats the activities of the first hour, hoping that our goldfish memories will make it all look brand new again.

This is the picture perfect example of when someone came up with an idea they though was great, whilst really drunk or stoned, which they were forced to carry through with after sobering up. Maybe two people, a producer and a studio executive, got wasted one night. The producer, a comely lass or buff stud, got ripped on free cocaine, too many shots of Jagermeister or Codral cold and flu tablets, and bellowed out “How about we put Samuel L. Jackson and some snakes on a plane?”
“Brilliant”, bellows the studio executive, and then proceeds to bait the trap.
“Have painful and unnatural sex with me now, and I guarantee the flick will get made.”
“Okay,” bleats the young producer, ready to take one for the team in order to further their ambitions.
The next day, the exec finds that the producer is holding them to the agreement or else sexual harassment charges will rain down from the heavens upon their creativity-bereft head. And thus is history made.

That stupid scenario I just came up with is better thought out and had better dialogue than anything in Snakes.

Julianna Margulies co-stars as a stewardess in this flick, which I note only for the fact that at one point in this woman’s career, she was under contract to the television show ER, and was paid $100 million for one year’s work. Seriously, that’s how successful she was. From that, to this. She must be cursing the day that deal with the devil fell through in such a spectacular fashion.

All of this would have been okay, or even justifiable, if the flick was even vaguely entertaining. It is not, regardless of the idiotic amount of hype generated by studio hacks and willing dupes in the media and amongst geeks on the net.

Avoid profoundly, avoid assiduously, above all avoid at all costs.

3 times that the use of the old chestnut “suck the poison out of someone’s arse” joke is proof positive the morons who scripted this had not one original idea in their pointy little heads out of 10

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“Why exactly are there snakes on this plane?” – why indeed, Snakes on a Plane.