Plane - An Entertaining Good Old Fashioned Action Movie without Relying on Heavy CGI

When I saw trailer to this movie in the cinema a couple of weeks ago, I thought it looked like fun and was interested because of the lead cast. But as we were unavailable on its release date, my wife and I decided to see it during the weekend. OK I will just get right to it.

Brief Story Line

On New Year's eve, the experienced Captain Brodie Torrance (Gerard Butler - Last Seen Alive, Den of Thieves etc) was piloting a commercial plane from Singapore to Japan along with his co-pilot Samuel Dele (Yoson An - Mulan live version etc) and few flight attendants led by Bonnie (Daniella Pineda - Cowboy Bebop TV series, Mercy Black etc). There were only 14 passengers in the flight but among them was a murder suspect named Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter - Evil TV series, Carter etc) who was being transferred for extradition.

Due to some reasons, the plane had to do emergency landing on an island in the Philippines. Unfortunately for them, the island was inhabited by hostile militias. Now Brodie had no choice but to enlist the help of Gaspare to save the passengers. The airline also appointed Scarsdale (Tony Goldwyn - Scandal TV series, Nixon etc) to handle the crisis.

So how would the story conclude? You can find them all in this movie.

End of Brief Story Line

It has been a while since my wife and I saw an action movie in the cinema where we could just enjoy ourselves without a complicated story. And frankly we were truly entertained by this movie. It has a simple plot and did not require us to scratch our heads to understand it. Plus the lead characters were really suitable in their roles and the villains were really convincing as the bad guys that we did not have sympathy at all and just wish the worst for them.

The movie started off with the introduction of the main characters and did not take too long to get to the exciting part. That emergency landing scene was so intense that both of us were really strapped to our seats with my wife literally holding firmly to the cinema's chair handles. But the suspense did not stop there and I think the audience were enjoying themselves too as could be felt after the movie ended that they felt relieved and sounded satisfied.

The choosing of Gerard Butler as the lead cast was a smart move seeing he is very experienced as an action star (which should not be a surprise since he also served as one of the producers). And the addition of Mike Colter as the murder convict was brilliant as well, especially if you have seen the series where he played the Marvel superhero Luke Cage. The rest of the cast did their job adequately. I was not familiar with the passengers except for Joey Slotnick whom I have seen before (Hollow Man, Nip/Tuck TV series) as the annoying Sinclair. Oh, I also think it was fantastic for them to cast real Filipinos in here, including Evan Dane Taylor (of Filipino descent) who played Datu Junmar. Although the movie itself was shot in Puerto Rico and not in the Philippines.

The action was definitely the highlight for me and my wife. It might not be the very sophisticated type with lots of CGI being used but it was just good old fashioned hand to hand fights plus heavy combat scenes. Having good sound effects in the cinema certainly helped in adding the intensity with the sound of bullets ricocheting all around the theater. I also liked the fight between Brodie and one of the militia in the middle which was smartly taken from a tight angle. In the action part, I thought the director Jean-Francois Richet (one of his past works was the 2005 remake of Assault in Precinct 13 which was also pretty good action movie) quite excelled with some violent action scenes that made this classified as R rating and 17+ in Indonesia.

Overall this was an entertaining action movie that would satisfy fans of this sort of films. To my surprise, even critics were quite receptive of it. My wife and I enjoyed the movie a lot as it did not have boring moments for 107 minutes (with no mid or post end credit scene). Despite not having big budget, the movie was successful in showing us some amazing action sequence. It had few humorous, emotional moments and even shocking scene as well. And the climax was just truly awesome that my wife clapped her hands more than once. So if you are looking for an intense action movie with some really suspenseful moments, then you would love this one just like we did.

Mike's movie moments rating: 4 out of 5 stars