Item: Plane
Rating: 8
Author: Chris Bumbray

Last Updated on January 12, 2023

PLOT: When a plane is forced to make an emergency landing on a island run by heavily armed insurgents, the heroic captain (Gerard Butler) must rely on an unlikely ally to save the passengers – a convicted murder (Mike Colter) who was being transported on the flight.

REVIEW: January used to be regarded as dump month – a time when studios could burn off all of their less than cherished product. But, in an era of event films and tentpoles, the attitude has changed. While the month used to be a dead zone in terms of quality, it’s also become a fertile zone for studios to release genre films, with horror and lower-budgeted action films often turning solid profits given that they are faced with little competition for those multiplex bucks. Take, for example, M3GAN’s massive opening last weekend. As such, Lionsgate has decided to release their latest Gerard Butler action flick, Plane, whose trailer quickly went viral back in the fall thanks to the clear-cut simplicity of the premise. It looks like the kind of movie that delivers exactly what it promises, and having caught the film myself, I can confirm that Plane is a perfect example of a B-action movie done well.

In it, Gerard Butler plays a disgraced pilot named Brodie Torrence, who’s reduced to working holiday runs out of Singapore after assaulting a drunken passenger who got rough with some flight attendants. It’s New Year’s Eve, and he’s set to fly what he thinks will be a milk run, only for the plane to be inadvertently guided into a storm, leading to an emergency landing on Jolo, a remote island in the Philippines rules over by anti-government militias. When he goes looking for help, his passengers are taken hostage, and Brodie becomes determined to rescue them or at least keep them alive until they are extracted. Luckily, he has some unexpected help in Mike Colter’s Louis Gaspare, a convicted murderer who was being transported on the flight but is set on redeeming himself by aiding Torrence and the passengers.

In the past, Gerard Butler’s movies have typically done well when they’ve presented him as a man of action, with the Olympus Has Fallen trilogy, Den of Thieves and Greenland all doing pretty decent business. Plane is perfectly crafted to play to all of his strengths, with him playing a decent everyman who’s maybe not the killing machine another action hero would be – which makes him a more compelling lead. He’s presented as a veteran, meaning he can handle himself, but he’s the kind of lead a guy like Paul Newman, Steve McQueen or Charlton Heston might have played in a seventies disaster movie. He’s gets things done but isn’t a quintessential action hero. He’s vulnerable, making him an excellent alternative to guys like The Rock, Vin Diesel or Jason Statham, who are infamously unwilling to take their licks on screen. At one point in the movie, Butler gets into a vicious hand-to-hand battle with a militia member, and he fights like a guy trying desperately to survive rather than a superhero. The cool thing about a character like this is that even though you know – deep down- he’ll be fine, he gets the crap kicked out of him repeatedly and wins through ingenuity and courage rather than brawn.

One also has to note that Butler must be pretty secure in that he allows co-star Mike Colter to get a fair share of the heroics. Colter is younger and brawnier, and it’s nice to see a guy like Butler allowing an up-and-comer their time to shine, and Colter is terrific in the part. His Louis Gaspare is a mysterious killer with a noble streak, and I like the fact that he’s presented as unreservedly heroic once the chaos starts. You never think he’s going to betray Butler – you know he’s a hero. Were Plane to launch a mid-level franchise, were they to do a sequel a logical way to do it would be to focus on Colter, with him shown to be a roving adventurer always one step ahead of the law.

In addition to the two dynamic leads, Plane is extremely well directed by Jean-Francois Richet, who did the underrated Assault on Precinct 13 remake and the excellent Mel Gibson vehicle, Blood Father, but also a two-part French crime movie masterpiece, Mesrine, starring Vincent Cassel. Those two movies, Killer Instinct and Public Enemy Number 1, were my favorite movies of 2008 and are dying to be discovered by action fans. He directs Plane in a taut, efficient way, keeping the pace tight and the action propulsive. It runs a lean 107 minutes and the momentum never lets up for a second. The movie’s premise is a good one, with it reminiscent not only of 70s disaster movies like Airport 1975, Skyjacked and The Cassandra Crossing but also a really cool horror thriller from the 30s called Five Came Back, which is a gem that’s worth discovering too. The supporting cast is similarly efficient, with Tony Goldwyn as the airline fixer trying to extract the passengers – it’s a treat for us to see a corporate guy who’s not portrayed as a complete sociopath and isn’t trying to cover up the crash. Daniella Pineda from Cowboy Bebop plays the head flight attendant, and it’s a sign of the movie’s efficiency and lack of cheese that there’s no tacked-on romance between her and Butler. In the film, everyone has one goal only – to survive, and Plane is a solid throwback in that it’s reminiscent of movies from the nineties, which didn’t get bogged down in trying to be all things to all people.

While Plane is definitely not a blockbuster tentpole, it’s actually a whole lot more entertaining than most movies I’ve seen recently that had three or four times the budget. It’s just a damn solid time at the movies, and it ranks as one of Butler’s best all-around action movies. It’s nice to see an old-school action star that still has the chops, and lack of vanity, to do these movies right.