Tonight, I saw Flightplan because the concept appealed to me: a mystery confined within a very limited, closed space, an airplane in this case. Jodie Foster plays a mom whose child disappears mid-flight—or did she? It could be there is a kidnapping or a terror plot in the works. But was the child ever aboard the plane? Is she dead, like the mother’s recently deceased husband, who’s being transported in a coffin the plane’s hold?
I didn’t like the movie as much as I’d thought because for the first half, it’s a scramble to locate the daughter. After some twists in the action reveal key plot points, the movie falls into more of a Die Hard kind of film. I can’t give too much away because this is a Sixth Sense sort of film with plot twists one mustn’t disclose, except that unlike Sixth Sense, Flightplan makes little sense even after you’ve reached the end and thought back to how and why certain things transpired.
I thought the movie would be a bit more like my favorite stuck-in-a-room dramas, like Panic Room or Hitchcock’s Dial M For Murder and Rope. But the reason I like those movies is that the audience is in on the antagonists or the murder plot from the get-go. Hitchcock liked to illustrate this style with the anecdote of a bomb going off suddenly in a room: that’s surprising. But the same scene where the audience is aware the bomb is there, but it doesn’t immediately detonate: that’s suspense. Jodie rambling around a plane for her missing daughter: that’s just kinda boring after awhile. Who cares? Confine that woman and give her a sedative.