CHENNAI: “Plane,” helmed by Jean-François Richet from a screenplay by Charles Cumming and J.P. Davis, pales in comparison to some of the great action thrillers of our time.
With a half-hearted storyline, the only real attraction is Gerard Butler as Captain Brodie Torrance who pilots a huge commercial airline from Singapore to Tokyo just before New Year’s Eve.
Torrance is a single dad, who promises his little girl that he will be back in Singapore to ring in the New Year, but the universe has other plans. Among the sparse passenger list is a convicted murderer named Louis Gaspare (a middling performance by Mike Colter), who is being extradited. The plot thickens when the pilot is rather bizarrely forced to fly into the eye of a menacing storm, eventually landing on an island inhabited by separatists and militias.
We quickly pivot into an escape drama with the passengers trying to escape the militants and seek out a mode of communication on the jungle. Richet jumps genres and the work is uneven with more lows than highs.
Butler manages to be the film’s saving grace — his conversations with his daughter are endearing and memorable, while the director fails to build any real tension in the plot.
