Brodie Torrance is an airline pilot with a former military background, who now flies sidelines after a drunken brawl caused him to downgrade. He didn’t take it badly though: his real pain is the loss of his wife and his main concern is getting back to his daughter for the start of the new year. Unfortunately there is a storm on his route and the airline, to save on fuel for a seldom frequented flight, requires him to fly over the disturbance, which however turns out to be worse than expected and ends up causing the plane to crash into a island in the Philippines in the hands of separatist guerrillas. A no man’s land where Brodie will have to team up with Gaspare, a fugitive accused of murder who travels in handcuffs with the passengers.
Jean-François Richet, the director of Mesrine, returns to theaters with a food film centered on the action hero Gerard Butler, usually also a good family man.
It is emblematic of the state of health of French genre cinema, and European in general, that a director like Richet had to resign himself to a film like this, to return to theaters now five years after the previous The Emperor of Paris. He tries to put some of him into it, with a close-up melee between Butler and a guerrilla, but apart from this moment, the rest of the action is completely sui generis, not too effective in sorting out the confusion of the shootings. But if the staging is of service, the real problems are in the writing.
The film devotes a lot of time to the first act on the plane flight without however strong spectacular moments or a description of the passengers who find some interesting characters, apart from the silent criminal Gaspare. When it comes to the inevitable shipwreck, the writing goes from being not very incisive to completely absurd passages: for the commander to go exploring accompanied only by the criminal, to keep him away from the passengers, seems a potentially suicidal risk. Just as the third act, with the presence of some mercenaries and an inexplicable stubbornness of the guerrillas in the face of superior firepower, is justified only with large doses of suspension of disbelief.
It is after all an unpretentious film, little better than the straight-to-video action of the past, with a Gerard Butler not too busy in the action scenes and flanked by a very little charismatic actor: the Mike Colter of the TV series Luke Cage and Evil. The exotic scenario is also not valued in a spectacular sense and the villains are generic brutes who are completely interchangeable with each other, where even the leader is not endowed with any personality beyond a functional ruthlessness.