There may be no title in cinema history more hilariously generic than Plane, and the fact that much of the film’s story is set on the ground rather than in the air only further underscores its silliness. Nonetheless, the bluntness of that moniker is perfectly in tune with this B-movie’s rugged thrills, which are as meat-and-potatoes as its lead, Gerard Butler.
Arguably the best of Hollywood’s old-school action heroes, Butler is in fine macho form in Jean-François Richet’s feature, which hits theaters Jan. 13, proving once again that few marquee leads are as comfortable, and skilled, at kicking ass in do-or-die genre efforts.
Plane is a cheeseburger and a side of fries in movie form. It stars Butler as Brodie Torrance, a Scottish pilot for Trailblazer Airlines who is stationed out of Singapore. As he races through the airport, he phones his college-student daughter Daniela (Haleigh Hekking) to reassure her that he’ll be in Maui in time for New Year’s Eve. Given the many stops along his route. Daniela doesn’t quite buy her dad’s promise. Then again, he’s Gerard Butler, so she can’t doubt him too much.
Exuding confidence as he boards his craft and greets the colleagues who’ll be joining him for the flight, Torrance is immediately cast as a stout commander who doesn’t rattle easily. His confidence is actually so great that he barely blushes when, while getting passengers into their seats, he’s informed that they’ll have an unexpected guest on this trip: Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter), a fugitive who’d been hiding out in Bali and is now being extradited to Toronto on a 15-year-old murder charge.
Considering that Gaspare makes suspicious eyes with both passengers and crew members upon takeoff, it’s natural to assume that Plane is setting up a standard scenario in which the criminal employs covert cohorts to escape captivity and hijack the craft. Those expectations are dashed, however, when the film instead thrusts all its characters, noble and shady alike, into peril, courtesy of some horrific weather that the penny-pinching airline wouldn’t allow Torrance to avoid.
Horrific turbulence sends everyone into a panic, and two passengers into the air, killing them both. Worse, a lightning strike knocks out the craft’s power (including its radio), thus requiring Torrance and his young family-man copilot Dele (Yoson An) to prepare for an emergency landing in the stormy ocean.
Fortunately, before they take their chances in the raging waters below, Torrance spots distant land and heads toward it, eventually locating a dirt road that he can use as a makeshift runway. As with a later plane-related sequence, director Richet stages this predictable scene with a surprising amount of propulsive tension, aided by Butler’s committed cockpit performance.
Once on the ground, Torrance calms his passengers and takes stock of their circumstances, which are heightened by the fact that Gaspare is still in their midst, and his perpetually glowering glares make him resemble a predator waiting to strike. Though they’re not 100 percent sure where they’ve touched down, Torrance and Dele deduce that they’re on one of the many Philippines islands run by violent separatists. With scant supplies and no means of contacting home, Torrance takes it upon himself to explore a nearby building alongside Gaspare, who it turns out is a former French Legion soldier.
Plane glosses over Gaspare’s crime in a way that makes it sound justified or, at least, defensible enough that it doesn’t mark him as a scoundrel—therefore allowing him to function as Torrance’s reliable partner-in-bravery. While the duo embarks on their mission through the jungle, the film cuts back to airline headquarters, where owner Terry Hampton (Paul Ben-Victor) hires consultant David Scarsdale (Tony Goldwyn) to troubleshoot the situation.
Scarsdale’s solution is to hire a team of mercenaries to visit the island with a cache of military-grade weapons and $500,000 in cash (should they need to buy their way out of trouble). Their loot is an amusingly transparent method of adding another motivational element to this combustible stew, and the soldiers of fortune soon pinpoint their target after Torrance discovers a phone and gets through to the U.S. mainland.
Rescue is ultimately complicated by Junmar (Evan Dane Taylor), the villainous bandit leader who runs this perilous island and who, as Torrance and Gaspare learn, makes a (literal and figurative) killing by taking visitors hostages—such as a prior group of missionaries—and ransoming them for cash.
This provides Butler and his compatriots with hordes of faceless adversaries, and in its best scene, director Richet has Torrance square off against an attacker in a prolonged single-take skirmish that’s defined by clumsy wrestling, arduous fisticuffs, and exhausted chokeholds. The convincing ungainliness of that encounter is bracing, and far more interesting than the competent if perfunctory shootouts that follow in the separatists’ compound.
There’s little subtlety to Plane’s characterizations and even less subtext to its narrative; as written by Charles Cumming and J. P. Davis, Richet’s film is a no-nonsense programmer (think Flight of the Phoenix crossed with Die Hard) that’s all brawny surface. Still, as he demonstrated in Olympus Has Fallen, Geostorm, and Den of Thieves, Butler has a knack for fitting himself snugly into familiar formulas and then elevating them through a combination of charisma and conviction.
Torrance is a two-dimensional good guy and man of action who always maintains a level head, does what’s necessary (and right) in moments of adversity, and puts the safety of innocents ahead of his own—all while still loving his family. He’s an every-He-Man cut from an archetypal cloth, and yet Butler plays him with such sincerity, toughness and smarts that it’s impossible not to instinctively root for him.
Plane is the sort of film that studios churned out by the dozens in the ’80s and ’90s, and there’s something cheesily endearing about its no-frills approach to action, in which—in the face of evil foreigners as well as sniveling Americans, here embodied by Joey Slotnick’s grating plane passenger—selfless can-do manliness always carries the day. That Butler can handle such a role is obvious. That he can make it this engaging, however, is a testament to his magnetism, and confirmation of his status as one of the medium’s last genuine badasses.
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