Plane (2023)

I think it’s fair to say you will never see Plane as an in-flight movie. At least, I sure as hell hope you don’t. In Plane, after all, the fictional Trailblazer Airlines relies on faulty technology and pushes its pilots into dangerous situations, all for the sake of saving a few precious dollars. Can you even fathom an airline doing business that way? Perish the thought.

Thankfully, Plane is as lean and muscular an action-thriller as its no-frills name. One envisions Lionsgate executives breathlessly awaiting inspired movie titles from its marketing team of Tarzan, Tonto and Frankenstein’s monster. That is no knock on the movie. Like its rough-around-the-edges hero pilot, Plane is irresistibly old-school without being knuckle-headed.

Gerard Butler lets his Scottish brogue fly as Trailblazer Capt. Brodie Torrance, a single dad tasked with a red-eye flight from Singapore to Tokyo on New Year’s Eve. Brodie is a widower who doesn’t see enough of his daughter, which is about all the pathos that screenwriters Charles Cummings and J.P. Davis have time for.

His expectation of a quiet flight is upended a bit when an FBI agent shows up escorting a prisoner, Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter), being extradited to Toronto for a 15-year-old murder charge. Aside from the handcuffed hulk in the back of the plane, however, the remaining dozen passengers seem fairly anodyne.

Things go bad quickly. Bean-counters for the airline order Brodie and his co-pilot (Yoson An) to fly straight into a storm. A lightning strike knocks out the power shortly after the plane is airborne, forcing the pilots to crash land on a remote island west of the Philippines. The sequence on the aircraft is superbly crafted. Eschewing a music score, director Jean-François Richet ratchets up the claustrophobia and tension through the use of closeups and jittery camerawork.

As it turns out, any flight doomed to crash in a jungle should be so lucky as to have a prisoner onboard. First, it means the lawman providing escort is certain to be armed. Second, there’s always the chance that prisoner will be an expert killer with skills learned from having served in the French Foreign Legion. At least that’s Brodie’s (only) good fortune, as Gaspare turns out to be the most helpful passenger – certainly more so than the obnoxious American businessman (Joey Slotnick) yammering into his cellphone. The island is populated by armed separatists whose leader (stuntman Evan Dane Taylor) sees the crash survivors as potential hostages. It’s is left to Brodie and Gaspare to show the bad guys who’s boss.

The ending is never in doubt, but the fun is in getting there. Richet knows how to build suspect at a low simmer, and he can stage a fight scene when needed, right up until things go a little kooky in the third reel with Filipino thugs firing shoulder-launched rocket-propelled grenades.

Butler is especially effective. He tones down his customary bluster a few notches to make Brodie more human than superhero. The guy is still a badass, of course, but this heroic pilot actually gets winded after engaging in mortal combat. Butler and Colter have appealing buddy chemistry. An and Daniella Pineda (as the lead flight attendant) shine in smaller roles, while Tony Goldwyn is all corporate swagger as Trailblazer’s crisis management expert. In the end, Plane is as inconsequential as an in-flight magazine, but it still gets you where you need to go.