Starring: Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle, Kelly Reilly, Bruce Greenwood, John Goodman
Director: Bob Zemeckis
Running time: 138 minutes
Released by: Paramount Pictures
Out:1st February
William 'Whip' Whitaker (Denzel Washington), wakes up in a hotel room, reaches over a naked woman to finish one of many bottles of beer, sniffs a line of cocaine and heads off to the day-job... as pilot for a major air-line. Secretly indulging in a couple more mini-bottles of whiskey before take-off, Whitaker assures his nervous and suspicious co-pilot that he and everything will be fine.
Everything... as it turns out, will NOT be fine as the plane ultimately hits the kind of turbulence that keeps you awake at night - especially if you're on the plane experiencing it. With what appears to be a major systems failure, the plane begins to plummet to the ground. There seems to be no chance of saving the aircraft or its passengers from certain death. However Whitaker has one desperate last-chance idea and executes a maneuver that will be talked about for years to come. While his actions save all but two members of his crew, the scrutiny that comes with the resulting investigation into the downing of the plane brings an unwelcome spotlight on Whitaker's possible excesses. Those around him seek to shield him from the suspicions that follow, but while 'Whip' is a hero to many, he may also be his own worst enemy...
On its release in the US in November, the film got some rave reviews - critics employing more 'soaring' and 'flying high' metaphors than you could shake a plane at and proclaiming that award nominations were simply a formality. Which leaves me a bit baffled, as, after enduring Flight's two-hour-plus running time, I came out thinking that when Denzel Washington can spectacularly save a plane full of passengers but not a motion picture, there's something very much amiss.
The problems are two-fold. Firstly, the secret of good drama - as someone very old and very wise once told me - is that you start small and build. You should build up to having the audience on the edge of their seat. Flight, on the other hand, downs a double-snifter and decides to START massively and then merely circle in a slowly descending holding-pattern of despair and pity until it's not only the Jack Daniels that's on the rocks. Secondly, this seems to be a film suffering not from alcoholism but split personality. It begins as an action film, becomes a character study of dependency, convinces you it may segue into a bittersweet romance and then decides it wants to be a comedy. It veers so suddenly and drastically from one to the other that the word 'turbulence' doesn't do it justice. Attach that to a distinct lack of actual story momentum and we're not watching a big-screen plane-crash, we're watching a cinematic car-crash.
Now... none of this should indicate that Denzel Washington isn't a solid actor. He has proven time and time again that if you give him a good role, he can make it a great performance. There are moments in Flight where he shines and if the film was marketed as a 'flawed hero's battle with the bottle' rather than a 'thriller' (which it clearly is not, or at least not in the way the kinetic trailer sought to convince us) then at least we'd be prepared to judge it on the correct merits. Washington plays a (sometimes) functioning drunk with aplomb, but we've signed up for that advertised thriller not a pro-celebrity AA-meeting... and after over an hour of passive-aggressive (and aggressive-aggressive) self-sabotage and ballistic benders, it's hard to feel much sympathy for a guy SO continuously bent on self-destruction and unable to take the help offered. Academy award voters clearly disagree - Washington got the nomination as predicted.
The supporting cast, good in their own right, wander in from those aforementioned disparate genres. Kelly Reilly (Me and Orson Welles, Sherlock Holmes, A for Andromeda) is great as Nicole, an ingenue addict trying to get her abused life back on track and helped and hampered by Whitaker in equal measure. Don Cheadle is an ever-pragmatic lawyer trying to keep Whitaker from being his own worst enemy and the often under-rated Bruce Greenwood ably supports as the company executive wanting to stand by his friend. John Goodman wanders in, presumes everyone's filming a slapstick Big Lebowski sequel, dispenses narcotics, cracks some jokes and leaves.
The film is directed by Rob Zemeckis, better known for his work on the likes of the Back to the Future franchise, Forrest Gump and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and who has stayed in a more producing role over much of the last decade. It's a change of pace for him and it's good to see him back centre-stage. But, frustratingly, there's a far superior film within Flight trying to get out. The best moments are the original crash-sequence (quite as breath-taking and audacious as you're ever likely to see on screen) and then a much quieter scene in a hospital stairway when a recovering Whitaker meets Nicole and a cancer-patient, played by a scene-stealing and unusually gaunt James Badge Dale ( The Pacific, 24 and the forthcoming Iron Man 3) for a circumspect ciggie. Either scene could have been spun out and maximised to make a compelling film of its own and yet both are ultimately wasted as we go in search of actually getting wasted, another beverage from the mini-bar and into territory that the likes of Ken Loach and Peter Madden could mine much more brutally.
Flight is a well-intentioned film with a solid cast and moments of class and inspiration that you WANT to like because of the first-class talent involved, but it's also one filled with so much relentless self-loathing and moral ambivalence that the audience are merely likely to roll their eyes, assume the crash position and brace for the credits.
Like the plane itself, Flight is shiny and full of baggage, but ultimately it's also off-course and desperately in need of a better rudder to guide it home...
6/10
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