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How entertaining? ★★★★☆
Thought provoking? ★★☆☆☆ 28 January 2013
This article is a review of FLIGHT.
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“The plane was f*cked Charlie. Doomed,” Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington)
I’d place director Robert Zemeckis in the same category as David Fincher and James Cameron: A technological innovator and bravura filmmaker. Fans of BACK TO THE FUTURE, CONTACT, DEATH BECOMES HER, must have been awaiting his return to live action after a decade of patchily impressive animations (THE POLAR EXPRESS, etc.).
GLORY, MO’ BETTER BLUES, TRAINING DAY, Denzel clearly knows how to portray vibrant human beings. His FLIGHT performance might well be his best however. That Vanity Fair photo heading, “A League of His Own”, is on the money. Not only does Washington add class and panache to tripe (see DEJA VU), but when he lends his weight to a quality project, cinematic fireworks are on the agenda.
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FLIGHT is a movie in three differing parts:
- A spectacular plane crash;
- The aftermath focusing on addiction; and
- A tribunal procedural.
Opening with surprisingly adult material from the normal family-friendly Zemeckis, we get full frontal female nudity and a camera whooshing towards the face of Denzel’s Whip Whitaker as he snorts a line of cocaine. We’re not in WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT territory. Whip finishes his beer and heads to the passenger plane he is due to captain. Unless FLIGHT is the first movie you’re watching, you can surmise the journey is not going to end well. Add into the mix a few vodkas during the trip, and you’re probably hoping this guy never flies you; that is, until you see the man in action. When the aircraft starts to nose dive, Whip’s intuition/chutzpah/skill kicks in. A jaw-dropping manoeuvre saves just about all those on board. Clearly a tragedy, the film then asks:
- Is Whip a hero?
- Who is to blame?
“You will never pay for a drink as long as you live,” Harling Mays (John Goodman)
A union representative, and friend, Charlie Anderson (Bruce Greenwood), and lawyer, Hugh Lang (Don Cheadle), aim to divert any culpability away from Whip. As you can imagine, an alcohol-addicted man in denial, who has plenty of brio, is not going to be the easiest of clients, or friends. Bring in Kelly Reilly’s heroin over-dose survivor prostitute attempting to stay clean, FLIGHT continually attempts to side-step expectations. As the director stated at the press conference about the script, it was “full of moral ambiguity, which I hadn’t read in a long time.” And that screenplay is a diamond. The character friction and interplay allows talented thesps to flex their acting muscles as if it was a Mr/Miss Universe contest. Funnily enough, like LINCOLN released in the same year, both Spielberg and Zemeckis have almost completely subsumed their usual camerawork flair, and just allowed the dialogue to ping and the actors to zing.
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