‘Plane’ — Gerard Butler Sticks The Landing in Another B Action Flick
Jean-Francois Richet’s latest feature is surprisingly uncompromising and bold.
Imagine starting out as an actor at 27 in a dime a dozen horrors and romcoms, being hot shit for a year or two, and then, in your 50s, making questionable B movies on repeat for middle-aged dads with beer bellies cheering you on. That’s Gerard Butler’s career in a nutshell. If there’s a truly masculine actor from the UK (besides Jason Statham, of course) whose talent is wasted on boilerplate beat-em-up features, it’s the Scotsman from This Is SPARTA! Yet Butler doesn’t seem to mind the typecasting all that much — or he just loves consistent, easy work. Either way, every once in a while, he hits the bullseye and delivers a cool action-thriller that doesn’t drown instantly in mediocrity upon its release. Good news: Plane is one of those.
In Jean-Francois Richet’s latest potboiler, Butler plays captain Brodie Torrance, a nice guy with a testosterone-affirming stubble, who flies third-tier routes because once he beat up a scumbag for being rude to his flight attendant. He’s a widow with a young daughter in Hawaii, who he plans to visit on New Year’s Eve after a seemingly routine flight. The first bad sign suggesting it won’t go smoothly comes in the form of a prisoner, Gaspare…
