Plane

dir: Jean-François Richet

2023

PLANE! It’s called PLANE. Not even “THE” Plane. Not even Airplane!

Just PLANE. I would love to know why. I mean, perhaps the motivation or the thinking behind it isn’t that complex. After all, there is definitely a plane in this movie. But someone must have thought “fuck it, we’ll just call it Plane” after arguing for weeks. But why name it after that one object?

There are also other objects, other machines in this movie. At one point a telephone, an old landline, plays a crucial role in the story. I notice they didn’t call the movie PHONE. They could have called it GUN, or Plane Crash. Something simple, something declamatory. I mean Titanic was about a boat called the SS Titanic which sank a while back. They could have called it Boat by that logic.

I mean, this plane has a name too. The Trailblazer 119. No, too complicated, from a marketing perspective, as a title. Too frontloaded. Requires too much thinking. People will wonder what happened to the other 118 Trailblazers before this one.

I mean, what even is a thing? A plane? Is it the object itself, or what it does, or what happens to it? Do we assume that this plane is itself the Platonic ideal of a plane, or the essence of planeness? Or is it a stand-in, a symbol, representing all planes, all possible planes? You know what you are getting when you call a movie Plane. There will be a plane. And you will look at it, and think “that’s a plane, all right. Looks pretty CGI and fake, but it’s definitely a plane.”

Or could they even had been more subversive and called it Generic Movie Title? Now for that I would pay even more good money to see. Snakes on a Plane had snakes on a plane, and classic short film Football in the Groin had a football in the groin, but Plane?

It’s set mainly on a train in Spain while it rains.

I wish that they had carried over this approach to straightforward simplicity by having everyone talk in only single word declamatory sentences. Instead of asking “how are you?” people could yell “ALRIGHT?”

This sort of caveman approach to dialogue would suit a brute like Gerard Butler, with that lovely thick Scottish brogue of his, his neck tendons and forehead veins bulging every time he grunted “PLANE.” “CRASH.” “BAD!” at someone. I love Gerard Butler. He looks so confused and angry a lot of the time, like someone is trying to explain pronouns to him or helping him over the phone to connect his iPad to a printer. He’s utterly baffled.

He is perfectly suited to playing this role of a pilot. The first half hour is perfectly fine disaster cinema: we see the lead up to the flight, who Captain Brodie (Butler) cares about, (his daughter), what he’s lost recently that’s made him melancholy (his wife died), that he’s super-competent as a pilot and not a drunk at all, and that he used to fly for the Royal Air Force.

Then there’s the fly in the ointment – a last minute passenger addition of a criminal being transported (Mike Colter). Ouch, I wonder if he’s going to take over the plane or something.

Everyone is pretty scared of him, and it could be because he’s the only other black person on the flight, other than his law enforcement handler, who’s not long for this world, alas.

But wouldn’t you know it, this flight has bigger problems ahead of it – Captain Brodie is compelled, after leaving Singapore, to fly through a storm on the way to Tokyo in order to save fuel. Needless to say “LIGHTNING!” “BANG!” “CRASH!” as the heroic Brodie saves most people’s lives and the plane in an emergency landing on a dicey island in the Philippines.

But no-one except a warlord terrorist type knows where they are, and there’s no cell coverage, and Brodie, with the help of the crim, will have to try to save most of the passengers except for the poor Korean couple, one of whom gets their fucking head chopped off.

This part of the Philippines is lawless, and savage, we are told. Even the government won’t send soldiers there. These separatists are bad news. Very bad news. Also, they don’t really look like they’re from the Philippines, and the island looks more like Puerto Rico, but what do I know.

The bad guys are generic bad guys, with nary a personality between the lot of them. But they do have lots of guns. Too many guns for Captain Brodie and Gaspar, the suave French criminal who used to be in the Foreign Legion. Will they be able to put their differences aside and work together in order to save the day?

Will they fuck… No! I don’t mean will they hook up, although… no, it’s unlikely. Sometimes Brodie looks at Gaspar with something more than just gratitude or admiration, but, no, there’s no simmering sexual tension here. Brodie is just an angry dad who wants to save everyone and get back to his daughter, and Gaspar, well, other than to get away, who knows what sexy thoughts are in that sexy bald head of his…

While I might jokingly say that I love a big galoot like Gerard Butler, who, on his best days, still looks like he’s deeply, horribly hungover after a week of solid drinking, my love of Mike Colter is in no way ironic. Maybe, since he’s a much younger man than Butler (like, by at least 30 years, from the looks of it), he can use his success here to propel himself into stardom as even more of an action hero. For me I know him mostly from when he played the protector of Harlem, Luke Cage in the tv show of the same name. But he also plays the role of a priest in one of the strangest and most oddly enjoyable tv shows that I ever watch only when I’m travelling for work interstate, and have to watch *sniffs snootily* local television.

Yes, I do sometimes have to stay in hotels that don’t have cable or movie channels or streaming services *shudder*.

The show I’m blabbing about is called Evil. It is utterly bonkers.

Regardless of that, I love his soft-spoken ways, and the different kind of masculinity that he brings to the screen. He’s the opposite of brute force (which is to say, he’s the opposite of Gerard Butler, who is brute force personified), and yet he is the slinky and far more deadly partner in this duo.

Butler has played a kill crazy psychopath in bunches of films to date, but here he’s just a guy, who’s a good pilot, who’s never really had to kill people before (no matter how much they’re asking for it). It might seem like a strange distinction to point out, but too many movies, American or not, have people going from solid, upstanding, tax paying citizens to cold killing machines within seconds. In this flick Brodie kills a guy who was trying to kill him, and is horrified by what he had to do, and not only takes a long while to recover his equilibrium, but never develops a taste for butchery, nor does he become a killing machine just because the script could call for it.

I enjoyed this flick! I’m not embarrassed to say it. It’s purely a Thursday night flick, in that I can’t imagine finding this as amusing or fleet of foot if I had been completely sober and was expecting Quality Drama.

No, I was after an entertaining action-y time, and that’s what I got. This cheesy bullshit hits all the right notes, has some decent action scenes, and has a resolution so preposterous that I felt like saluting when I understood how they were going to get off the island.

You can’t say I didn’t warn you. It’s blaring at you, just from the fucking title. Plane was a fun enough night out at the movies.

7 times I’m never flying with Trailblazer Airlines ever again out of 10

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“No need to worry, folks, these planes are pretty much indestructible” – just like Gerard Butler’s head - Plane