Flightplan film review

certificate_12A

FLIGHTPLAN

For almost the entire duration of Flightplan, Jodie Foster has an anxious frown etched deeply on her taut face. It's little wonder when you consider her character Kyle Pratt's husband has recently died in an apparent fall and now her six year-old daughter Julie (Marlene Lawston) has gone missing on a Transatlantic flight. The anxiety shown by Kyle is never matched however by this overwrought thriller.

Playing on the pervasive paranoia of modern day airline travel, screenwriters Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray create a high altitude environment of fear and suspicion, even racial profiling a Middle-Eastern passenger. They have also got their own back on flight attendants, portraying them as an unsympathetic, cynical bunch. "It's okay to hate the passengers," one stewardess tells a novice colleague. Pity the writers if they are ever recognized by the crew on future flights.

By confining the action to the interior of the plane, like the recent Red Eye, it induces a claustrophobic element though in this case the aircraft is a fictional two tiered 700 plus seater behemoth which reduces the effect somewhat. Throughout though, German director Robert Schwentke has infused Flightplan with a clinical, detached reality, one obviously designed to reflect Kyle's delicate psychological state.

With the body of her husband on board, Kyle and Julie are taking the flight from Germany back to New York for the funeral. Clearly on edge, Kyle views everyone and everything with mistrust. It's apparently well founded when, after a short nap, she awakes to discover Julie has gone. Her concern, almost hysterical in its intensity, isn't shared by the flight crew, fellow passengers or air marshall Gene Carson (Peter Sarsgaard), none of whom recall ever having seen the young girl. The belief that Kyle is delusional is compounded when no trace of the girl can be found and records show she never boarded the flight.