'Flight Plan’ – Robert Schwentke (2005)

Robert Schwentke?s Flight Plan is a daring attempt at cross breeding an airline drama with a psychological thriller, and with Jodie Foster at the controls has all the potential to do so. From the first scene the film grabs the audience?s attention and keeps them in suspense with a plot that is at once mysterious and edgy, but somehow it doesn?t quite manage to get it right.

Widow Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) is flying from Berlin to America, with her six year old daughter, Julia, and the coffin containing the body of her dead husband, when the mysterious circumstances surrounding her husband?s death catch up with her. When Julia disappears, no one on the plane notices or remembers her coming aboard and the passenger manifest has no record of her being on the flight at all. Everyone soon concludes that Kyle is delirious and she is taken into the custody of US Air Marshal, Gene Carson (Peter Sarsgaard) sparking off a racially motivated attack and disrupting the flight for the other passengers in the process. The diplomatic Captain Rich, (Sean Bean) tries to make sense of things, only to be repeatedly confounded by the facts, and the deceit of others.

A crafty series of twists and turns take the film to its inevitable conclusion but the wooden acting and cast of stereotypical characters - including a conveniently placed psychiatrist with horn-rimmed specs - make it seem a very long time before it does. Despite a promising start, events aboard the flight take too long to develop and it feels as if a lot of the action is squeezed into the last 20 minutes as if it were an afterthought. The subtle breathless suspense of the early part of the film is completely forgotten, as it adopts the role of a more traditional mid-air action movie and loses most of its credibility. 

Foster is typecast as a lone woman struggling against all the odds, while Sean Bean overacts his way through the role of the pilot, complete with characteristic heavy breathing and a hushed trembling voice throughout.

'Flight Plan' hadd all the potential to be a great film, with a solid tried and tested formula and a reliable cast,  but sadly it falls just short of the mark. Although the plot is stylishly complex, it is a little too clever for its own good and seems to forget what it set out to achieve in the early scenes. Several questions remain unanswered and the whole thing seems annoyingly implausible. Unfortunately, even Jodie Foster is unable to rescue this film from appearing tired and worn, and even she looks bored by the end.