On DVD Now: Flight

“Flight”

2012

From the previews and trailers, this movie looked to be an edge-of-the-seat thriller. Unfortunately I had done no research, read no reviews, so I was duped.

We rented this on our satellite provider’s on-demand service.

It started out interestingly enough, with gratuitous but appreciated full frontal nudity, quite a bit of it, by a very fetching woman, Nadine Velazquez, who you might remember as the voluptuous, booby-bouncing illegal alien, Catalina, from the TV series “My Name is Earl”
 Denzel Washington’s character, ‘Whip’ Whitaker, and the extremely naked woman had just finished up what appeared to be a wild alcohol and cocaine fueled tryst. Whip’s phone rings, he says that he’s flying out in a couple of hours. Okay, scary.
All this further aroused my interest.

The next fifteen or twenty minutes was indeed a buildup of drama, tension, and then finally, abject terror as Whit fiercely battles an uncooperative and rapidly decomposing airliner into a low altitude inverted flight, in a tense race to get to the crash site as slowly as possible.

Whip keeps his cool, advises, bravely instructs and calms the crew, even as they are upside down a couple of thousand feet off the ground. Just before they inevitably collide with the planet Earth, Whip coolly rights the plane and manages to get it to glide, both engines afire, somewhat safely, into a field near a Pentecostal church. The Church is apparently symbolic of something here and makes a few more appearances.

 We expect the accolades and ‘Sully’ Sullenberger comparisons that obviously was this film’s initial motivation and maybe this film will explore the perils and tribulations of unexpected, but well-deserved fame. But no.

The action all happens in the first fifteen or so minutes, less time than may be spent watching a single excruciating episode of Sponge Bob.

Instead of what I expected, a procedural of the highly complex and political process of airline investigation and litigation, yeah, I could enjoy that, or a plot involving intrigue or savage crime or terrorism, it is a movie about a pathetic individual’s alcoholism and redemption, a-la VH1’s formulaic ‘Behind the Music’

The rest of the movie is about Whip’s ‘condition’. He does not believe he has a problem with alcohol, in fact he outright loves to overindulge in vicious binges and chemically infused physiological roller coaster rides.

Of course it is immediately discovered that at the time of the heroic, miraculous crash, that he was blowing nearly three times the legal limit of alcohol and that it was being counter-balanced by cocaine.

And of course the airline, the pilot’s union, etc. are trying to bury that evidence and a slick Chicago lawyer, played one-dimensionally by a criminally underutilized Don Cheadle, manages to find some procedural gaffes and indeed the blood test is excluded from future investigations. Only a confession from the skilled liar-alcoholic Whip could possibly get him convicted of anything other than abject heroism. You see it coming too, don’t you.

But that’s all the investigating we see. That’s all the courtroom intrigue we get. The rest of the movie actually follows Whip as he self-destructs with booze and lines of white powder, repeatedly, with the help of his pusher friend Harlan, played by John ‘why the hell are you in this lame movie’ Goodman.
Along the way Whip falls for and rescues a drug whore… excuse me, a lovely heroin addict, and they fall in and out of love and ravenous sex-capades until inevitably and completely unsurprisingly, that relationship implodes.

This goes on for over an hour. No action, no intrigue, no cat and mouse. It is entirely about an individual’s spiraling alcoholism and eventual and fully predictable redemption. He may as well have been a rock star or a coal miner. The heroic and skilled airline pilot aspect is actually meaningless to the tired plot.
Without the airliner angle, this movie could be any of a thousand or so addiction/redemption flicks on Lifetime.

How lame was it? By the second half Angel was browsing on her laptop and I was battling bricks, ice cubes and pigs with her Angry Birds machine.

The equivalent of walking out, not in anger or indignation, but in boredom.
 The initial premise, spills and thrills, is completely abandoned early on. It’s simply a lazy, lousy story form best left to amateur writers.

“What about ‘Gilligan’s Island’, seven diverse and eccentric characters, except instead of an island they’re trapped in an isolated and abandoned land fill?”  Would be a similar pitch.

We were duped, this movie sucked us in promising action, intrigue and adventure, then bludgeons us with drawn-out preachy, weepy sermons.

Unless you like the sappy pabulum dished out by Lifetime, this movie will disappoint you. Not worth the $4.99, nor even the $1 Red Box trip.