Plane is an Eminently Welcome January Surprise

Like most eight year old boys, my son Declan is obsessed with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. Just last month he flew to New York with his aunt and grandmother to see the Broadway musical before it closed. It was the trip of his young life. 

To Declan, Gerard Butler is the Phantom of the Opera so it boggles his young mind that pretty much no one else in the world sees him that way. 

Gerard Butler is the Phantom of the Opera in the same way that Vince Vaughn is Norman Bates. Being the Phantom of the Opera isn’t Butler’s identity as an actor or a movie star. It’s just a role he played in a lavish movie musical that no one considers the definitive version. 

I’ve tried to explain to Declan that Butler is an international movie star, albeit one rich and famous for beating up bad guys in interchangeable action movies and romancing ladies in regrettable romantic comedies rather haunting the the Palais Garnier Opera House or terrorizing a beautiful young singer.

Butler’s performance as the Phantom of the Opera doesn’t define him or his career the way it did Michael Crawford, who played the role on Broadway for three and a half years and is considered the definitive Phantom. 

The film and role that determined the course of Butler’s life and career was instead 300, the smash hit adaptation of Frank Miller’s xenophobic comic book series. 300 established Butler’s as a less problematic and less charismatic Mel Gibson, a hunky bruiser with a powerful frame and an air of slightly unhinged intensity. 

It’s this version of Butler that stars in the new thriller Plane. Butler plays Brodie Torrance, a pilot with an impressive resume but a seemingly limited professional future after he lost his temper and put a particularly obnoxious passenger in a sleeper hold. 

Plane begins as a drama about a flight that goes colorfully awry, threatening everyone onboard in the process. In that respect it has a lot in common with disaster movies of the 1970s. But where the Airport franchise and its many knock-offs and imitators delighted in unnecessary backstories, exposition and supporting characters, Plane is unexpectedly but refreshingly minimalist. 

In the typical disaster movie we learn that the pilot is having an affair with a stewardess, the big executive onboard is worried about blowing a big deal, newlyweds are concerned about a meddling mother in law and a whole bunch of other formulaic horseshit we couldn’t care less about. 

That, thankfully, is not true of Plane. There are no extraneous subplots. There are no characters taking up space who add nothing to film. Everything onscreen feels deliberate and essential. 

Disaster movies are generally full of distractions that pull us out of the reality of the film and into a cozily familiar world of cliches and conventions where we more or less know exactly what will happen and how. Plane eschews all of that foolishness. It’s as notable for what’s not in it as for what is. 

We also learn that Brodie is a father and a widower eager to be reunited with his loving daughter. But first our burly hero has to survive a flight with a pair of tricky variables. 

The weather is abysmal. The flight should probably be postponed but the struggling airline wants to save money even if it means putting the lives of its customers and employees in danger in the process.

There are a number of villains in Plane, capitalism and the airline industry among them. The other X factor is the presence of Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter), a prisoner being extradited on charges of murder. 

Brodie is understandably less than thrilled about this development but he has no real choice in the matter. It would be easy for Colter to go big and broad playing a muscle-bound killer in chains facing a lifetime in prison. 

Colter instead delivers a magnetic, deeply internal performance. He’s all coiled intensity and moral ambiguity as an anti-hero with a dark, shadowy past and an uncertain future. 

Weather proves the greater and more immediate obstacle when Brodie and his co-pilot Samuel Dele (Yoson An) are forced to make an emergency landing in Jolo in Asia. 

Brodie’s elation at having survived quickly turns into dread when he realizes that he’s touched down in a deadly realm ruled by warlords and militias. It’s a place so dangerous and lawless that the Philippine government has essentially abandoned it. 

Our heroes and his passengers go from a deadly situation full of peril, danger and abject terror to an even deadlier, even scarier scenario. 

When a local militia finds the passengers it takes them hostage with the intention of securing a sizable ransom but not before coldly executing someone as they try to flee. 

The airline sends in their own band of mercenaries to save the passengers, equipped with hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribe money and all manner of high-powered weaponry. They’re assisted in this endeavor by Brodie and Louis. 

The pilot and the criminal are not with the rest of the passengers and crew when they were captured by glowering international bad guys so it falls upon these very different, yet strangely simpatico figures to put aside their differences for the sake of a common goal.

Plane begins as a newfangled variation on the disaster movie about a uniquely cursed flight and its unfortunate inhabitants. In its second half it morphs into a 1980s-style Americans in the jungle exploitation romp about heroic westerners with very big guns taking on bazooka-toting baddies.

Yes, bazookas. I am a big fan of bazookas in film. When I worked at Blockbuster Video as a teenager we had, in addition to the regular Action section, sub-sections devoted to Wild Action and Super Action. Wild Action was pretty much action with boobs. Super Action was action with rocket launchers, bazookas and/or other forms of ridiculously huge, over-the-top weaponry. Since it involves both Americans in peril in the Philippine jungle AND bazookas, Plane would fit proudly into my old Blockbuster’s Super Action section. 

I expected next to nothing from Plane. On paper, it looks like undistinguished Redbox fodder starring an actor I grudgingly tolerate rather than enjoy. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Plane does just about everything right. 

It’s a quintessential January surprise: a modest little sleeper that does just what it sets out to do. It’s 107 minutes of solid, no-nonsense genre entertainment. 

That’s the nice thing about movies. You never know what you’re going to get. That dodgy-looking bit of action nonsense might just surprise you with its low-key, unpretentious craft and artistry. You might find yourself feeling deeply satisfied with a Gerard Butler vehicle with a generic title that was dumped into theaters during the dog days of January. 

As a film lover and movie reviewer I strive to always remain open to surprises because they’re a big part of what makes going to the movies such an irresistible and transformative experience. 

I’m back to doing what I love.

In conclusion, please subscribe to Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas. 

That’s all I ask of you.