Flightplan: Rating: 0.5 stars

A recently-widowed engineer (Jodie Foster) travelling on a giant passenger jet wakes up to find her young daughter missing… and nobody else on the plane even remembers the little girl. Has Mom lost her mind, or is she the victim of a Vast and Evil Conspiracy?

Flightplan (2005)
2005 · PG-13 · Thriller
Reviewed April 28, 2007

This film couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be The Lady Vanishes or Titanic; in its confusion, it fell far short of both. As the mother frantically searches the plane, her tension mounts — well, not really, since Jodie Foster starts out the movie on the verge of a nervous breakdown and hits full-blown hysteria within ten minutes, so she’s already plateaued by the time she’s running along the aisles. As bad as I knew this movie was going to be, I certainly expected a better performance from Foster, who spends the entire movie with the same expression on her face: furrowed brow, mouth open, eyes bulging like her head is about to explode. Of course, with a face like that, everyone on the plane is completely justified in thinking she’s a lunatic — and we, the viewers, are obviously supposed to doubt her sanity as well, because then we will be EXTRA SURPRISED when we finally get clued in on what’s really going on. Except not, because we are not morons. It’s a bad trip right to the end, where we get a climax so ridiculous and illogical that I nearly wept for all the people who had spent good money to see this in a theater. But the real kicker came when one of my neighbors stole this movie from its Netflix envelope before the mail carrier arrived; if ever I pitied a thief, I do now. May this movie break their DVD player, so that they may be spared the horror. Half a point to Peter Sarsgaard for out-acting Jodie Foster; everyone else involved in this gets a 0.