Flightplan
Distributor: DreamWorks
Rated: PG-13
Running time: 98 minutes


By Todd Jorgenson
Film Critic

Like the recent Red Eye, the new thriller Flightplan probably won’t be appearing on any upcoming in-flight movie menus.

It’s not because the airlines are finicky about quality, although Jodie Foster’s first starring role in three years certainly isn’t the finest work of her career. In fact, it doesn’t measure up to Panic Room, her most recent thriller about confinement in claustrophobic spaces.

The two films merit only cursory comparison, except that Panic Room was able to sustain its white-knuckle tension through its climax, while Flightplan fizzles out.

The premise has Kyle (Foster) flying from Berlin to New York on a giant double-decker, 425-passenger jet aircraft, along with her 6-year-old daughter, in order to bury her husband. When Kyle wakes from a nap, the girl has vanished, with fellow passengers and crew members claiming they never noticed her in the first place. They think she’s imagining the girl in a moment of grief-stricken insanity.

After frantically searching the plane, her distress starts to border on paranoia, and becomes disruptive. So Kyle concocts a few conspiracy theories and realizes she must try to solve the disappearance on her own.

For the first half, Flightplan has some skin-grabbing moments in the what-would-you-do vein. With a few high-tech references to post-Sept. 11 aviation security issues, it’s provocative enough to overlook its far-fetched coincidences.

But gradually, the plot holes open up as the red herrings become more obvious, secrets are too easily revealed, and logic dwindles amid a series of eye-rolling twists. The result finds the suspense sapped out just when the film should be at its most taut.

Foster does her best to keep this material afloat with another of her complex and effortlessly sympathetic performances, balancing grief with gutsy determination.

German director Robert Schwentke, meanwhile, demonstrates a confident visual style, although he’s no Hitchcock, whose 1937 masterpiece The Lady Vanishes seems awfully similar. The plane itself is a dazzler, even if its origins are never really explained.

Flightplan has its share of genuine tightly wound thrills, plus an opportunity for Foster’s fans to see her in full action-hero mode. But it never really takes off as a fully developed chiller, rather settling for familiar characters and cloudy motivations.