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Before a full 30 minutes have passed at the start of Plane (making its cable-TV premiere Sunday, March 23 on SYFY), an entire self-contained movie has already played out. In lesser action thrillers, in fact, its fast-paced front end would provide more than enough movie fuel to sustain the length of an entire feature film — but Plane has more ambitious ideas.
Like the old-school greats that might’ve inspired it (think Die Hard, Predator, and Speed), Plane is a great action flick because it’s all killer and absolutely no filler, crammed from start to finish with indispensable moments that (ahem) propel its adrenalized and fast-paced plot forward. Helmed by French director Jean-François Richet with an observant eye for key little details while always keeping a 40,000-foot altitude eye on the big picture, it’s a thrill ride that pulls no emotional punches, leaving audiences to agonize freely about whether there’s a happy landing waiting at the runway’s end.
Gerard Butler & Mike Colter collide to lift Plane sky-high
Gerard Butler (300, How to Train Your Dragon) dominates Plane’s opening vignette, a 25-minute action-flick introduction that, all on its lonesome, has a compelling beginning, a spine-tingling middle, and a satisfying end. Butler (who also co-produced the movie) plays Brodie Torrance, a seasoned Scottish pilot running Asian commercial routes across the Pacific, hoping to guide a last-minute New Year’s flight safely to harbor so he can meet up with his college-aged daughter (his late wife is three years gone) in time to celebrate the holidays.
There’s a single early sign of potential trouble in the form of Louis Gaspare (Luke Cage star Mike Colter), a shady-looking and handcuffed prisoner who’s easily the most eye-catching of the sleepy flight’s sparsely-populated passenger manifest. Gaspare’s got a murder rap in his past, so pilot Torrance is duly hesitant to let him on board… but local law enforcement insists that he has to be transported without any delay.
Forced by bad weather (and a parsimonious company bean counter) to take a dangerously direct route through a fierce storm, Torrance and copilot Dele (in a standout performance from Mulan actor Yoson An) forge an endearing and instant bond between two air-industry pros. Each instinctively senses that the other is good at his job, and together they rely on their mutual trust as the plane — battered by lightning and ferocious storm winds — loses power, gets tossed by turbulence, and sustains deadly damage that demands an immediate emergency landing… even if it means setting the big bird down in open ocean water.
With two people dead from the in-flight turbulence impact (most notably prisoner Gaspare’s one and only police handler), Torrance spots a tiny patch of land amid an endless horizon of Pacific waves. Cut off from comms and bereft of any onboard electrical assistance, he somehow achieves an all-manual landing on a painfully short stretch of unpaved native roadway, only to discover that the island where they’ve crash-landed is a haven for a militarized and ruthless regional terror cell.
That doesn’t even get you to the midway point of Plane, which pivots on a dime from an airborne nail-biter into a slower-paced cat-and-mouse game of jungle-stalking survival. Not all the passengers emerge unscathed from Torrance’s well-executed emergency landing, but all things considered, the small group at least remains largely intact. Yet it quickly becomes clear that the professionals (including a remarkably cool-headed flight attendant named Bonnie, played by Jurassic World franchise actor Daniella Pineda) have got to take charge if anyone at all stands a chance at making it off the island alive.
From there, it’s easy to guess at how Butler’s pilot character and Colter’s high-threat criminal guy might team up, especially after a quick scouting foray into the woods reveals that the island’s hostage-happy terror cell likely already knows that they’re there. But even when you’re correctly guessing at the movie’s next plot points, Plane pays its story out with oodles of redemption for all of its key characters, as each rises to meet the moment in ways that uniquely ask them, one by one, to summon the most dormant and seldom-used parts of their innermost moral makeup.
Like a lot of other one-word action flick names — and Plane itself is reportedly getting a Colter-starring sequel called Ship — this is a movie that suggests nothing more or less than a surface-level, popcorn-munching sort of empty entertainment. But mile for mile, Plane delivers action calories more nutritious than its peers, thanks in no small part to its two leading stars’ athletic chemistry… as well as an emotionally-centered story that never loses sight of its improvised runway.
Catch Plane on SYFY beginning Sunday, March 23 — click here to check out the full schedule!
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