First things first: Plane is quite a funny name for a film, isn’t it? The monosyllabic bluntness of it is oddly, unintentionally hilarious — like a toddler blurting out a newly learned word while pointing at something. Plane. What’s perhaps funnier still is that this B-movie-adjacent action-movie only spends 30 minutes of the runtime on an actual plane, abandoning the dunderheaded promise of that title before the first act is even over.
Plane is the latest in a subgenre you might call ‘Gerard Butler Saves The World’, a cheap-and-cheerful corner of cinema that has seen the Scottish hard man take on world-ending comets (Greenland), world-ending weather (Geostorm), and a series of increasingly ludicrous world-ending terrorists (the Has Fallen series). Plane, however, initially finds Butler not in action-hero mode, but everyman mode.
He plays airline pilot Brodie Torrance (a classic Gerard Butler character name, to sit proudly alongside ‘Mike Banning’ and ‘Big Nick O’Brien’), an ordinary bloke who loves his daughter, loves his job, and has been known to get into a scrap. When we first meet him, he’s captaining a near-empty flight to Tokyo on New Year’s Eve, making jokes over the Tannoy and offering famous last words (“There won’t be any delays!”).
There could have been a lean, minimalist thriller shaped simply around that opening half-hour, so it’s a shame that the film then immediately switches gears.
A bad omen comes with the arrival of Louis (Mike Colter — just as in his Luke Cage days, an Absolute Unit), a murderer being transported in handcuffs for extradition; the lightning storm they fly through is a worse omen still. Director Jean-François Richet wastes no time in crafting a genuinely tense emergency landing sequence — destined to be edited out of future inflight versions — which sees the plane’s power killed, forced to land in complete darkness.
There could have been a lean, minimalist thriller shaped simply around that opening half-hour, so it’s a shame that the film then immediately switches gears; what starts in a comfortable disaster-movie mould quickly handbrake-turns into a generic, by-the-numbers action thriller, serving up a stale platter of fist fights, gun battles and hostage-taking. More troublingly, the filmmakers show some insensitivity bordering on xenophobia towards the real Filipino island of Jolo, where the film is set, depicted here as a lawless hellhole run by psychopath gangster terrorists. The half-a-million people who actually live on Jolo might take issue with being characterised as blood-lusting murderers who, unprovoked, freely behead the first Westerners they come across.
All credulity falls apart in the final act, when the modern equivalent of the cavalry riding in to save the day — an ex-Special Forces mercenary unit — bravely gun down the evil terrorists, and the clichés flood through, thick and fast. But Butler is still decent company for this sort of thoughtless silliness, bringing some dad-who-had-a-bad-day charm and hard-as-nails muscularity to the kind of role that has become his speciality. We’re left only to wonder: what will he save the world from next?
