I love a good cheesy action flick. It if comes out in January or August, I’m probably gonna love it, haha. Extra points if things go boom and characters make such stupid decisions in an intense moment that it makes you laugh out loud. So, when we saw the trailer for an action movie starring Gerard Butler and Mike Colter (Luke Cage!!!) with a mid-January release, I knew I was all in.
There’s not a ton to say about Plane other than it lives up to expectations. First, the fucking title is simply PLANE. That’s it. Not “Lost Plane” or “Plane Has Fallen” (see what I did there?) or “The Flight from Singapore” or even “From Singapore to Tokyo with CRASH.” Just “Plane.” I mean…respect.
The plot is simple: It’s New Year’s Eve and a Scottish widower/single dad pilot is making the last flight of his shift and it’s from Singapore to Toyko. Then, he’s supposed to join his college-age daughter in Hawaii to celebrate New Year’s. He promises her sooo hard that he’ll be there that really, he jinxed himself with that one. He flies for some super budget airline (like Spirit or what people keep telling us Southwest is, even though Southwest hasn’t been even close to an affordable airline in like 6 years lololll). ~Plot twist~ There’s a bad storm going down and even though the flight only has 14 passengers on the manifest, the budget airline orders him to take flight, right through the storm. As you can imagine, it goes poorly and the plane has to make an emergency landing on an island in the middle of nowhere.
Is it a deserted island? OF COURSE IT’S NOT!!
It’s up to Butler and Colter (who plays the Kate Austen character, ill-fated air marshall and all) to keep the passengers and crew members safe from the dangers that await them on the island. No, the movie doesn’t go some cringy “cannibal natives” route, but don’t you worry, there’s still trouble!
To be honest, I was surprised by how uncomplicated the plot was. Plane goes down. People in trouble. Good guys save the day. Some requisite plots from the non-island world that actually don’t feel out-of-place or cheesy. The pacing was pretty decent; there wasn’t a lot of filler. I’m not sure if the screenwriters had an extra 50 pages that got slashed or if they are just no-nonsense lol but let’s just say the value of this movie is not in its script or writing. I wouldn’t have complained if we had gotten an addional 10 minutes of extra character development for the good and bad guys, but I do appreciate how focused this movie was on getting from points A to B to C (A-irplane to B-ad Guys to C-redits). It may not be a classic, memorable masterpiece for this genre, but it was pretty entertaining.
If you like watching these types of movies in theaters, it’s definitely more of a matinee-price film. Otherwise, I’m sure you’ll be able to catch it streaming from your couch in a month or so.
PLANE, from left: Gerard Butler, Mike Colter, 2023. ph: Kenneth Rexach / © Lionsgate / courtesy Everett Collection
