Flightplan (2005)

User Rating:

6.2/10   

Director:

Robert Schwentke

Writers (WGA):

Peter A. Dowling (written by) and
Billy Ray (written by)

Release Date:

23 September 2005 (USA)

Genre:

Action | Mystery | Thriller

Tagline:

If Someone Took Everything You Live For... How Far Would You Go To Get It Back?

Plot:

A claustrophobic, Hitchcockian thriller. A bereaved woman and her daughter are flying home from Berlin to America. At 30,000 feet the child vanishes and nobody admits she was ever on that plane.

Plot Keywords:

Home | Coffin | Apartment | Air Marshal | Hitchcockian

Awards:

1 win & 3 nominations

US TV Schedule:

Fri. July 17	8:00 AM	FX
Sat. July 18	12:01 AM	FX

Cast

Jodie Foster	...	Kyle Pratt
Peter Sarsgaard	...	Carson
Sean Bean	...	Captain Rich
Kate Beahan	...	Stephanie
Michael Irby	...	Obaid
Assaf Cohen	...	Ahmed
Erika Christensen	...	Fiona
Shane Edelman	...	Mr. Loud
Mary Gallagher	...	Mrs. Loud
Haley Ramm	...	Brittany Loud
Forrest Landis	...	Rhett Loud
Jana Kolesarova	...	Claudia
Brent Sexton	...	Elias
Marlene Lawston	...	Julia
Judith Scott	...	Estella

MPAA:

Rated PG-13 for violence and some intense plot material.

Runtime:

98 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English | French | German | Arabic | Italian | Japanese

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

DTS | Dolby Digital | SDDS

Certification:

Australia:M | Singapore:PG | UK:12A | Ireland:12A | Taiwan:PG-12 | Finland:K-11 | Indonesia:Dewasa | Hong Kong:IIA | Netherlands:12 | Germany:12 (f) | Switzerland:12 (canton of Geneva) | Switzerland:12 (canton of Vaud) | Brazil:14 | Sweden:11 | Czech Republic:12 | Portugal:M/12 | Iceland:12 | USA:PG-13 (certificate #41961) | Canada:PG (Ontario) | Canada:G (Quebec) | South Korea:12 | Philippines:PG-13 | New Zealand:M | Argentina:13

Filming Locations:

Berlin, Germany

Company:

Touchstone Pictures

Trivia:

Portia de Rossi and Christina Ricci were each offered the role of Kyle Pratt, but both turned it down. Josie Davis reportedly turned down the role of Kyle.

Goofs:

Factual errors: The PA at the airport in Berlin welcomes the passengers to "Berlin International airport". However, Berlin does not have one, but two international airports, Tegel and Schönefeld (and at the time of the movie, also Tempelhof), so the PA would have specified which one.

Quotes:

[first lines]
Mortuary Director: [in German, subtitled] Would you like a moment of privacy before the casket is sealed?
Kyle: [hesitantly] Okay.

Movie Connections:

Featured in Cabin Pressure: Designing the Aalto E-474 (2006) (V)

Soundtrack:

Silent Poet

A plot stretched wafer thin to provide a stage for good acting

Feature films invite us to defy reality, believe a fiction, suspend disbelief. The actor has to make the unreal, real. Jodie Foster has done this in the past with notable success and strings of awards – and often chosen stories that parallel our unwillingness to accept: a rape victim that no-one believed, a paranoid in a locked room that had every reason to be afraid, a scientist that finds proof of aliens. In Flightplan she goes one further – a mother who loses her daughter during a transatlantic flight and whom no-one (including, most of the time, the audience) believes.

Aircraft engineer Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) is devastated by the sudden death of her husband. She flies his body back to New York on a state-of-the-art airliner which she designed. Dozing off for a few minutes on the plane, she awakes to find her six year old daughter is missing. Frantic searches ensue as the mounting evidence suggests the daughter was never on board.

Flightplan combines a taut psychological thriller with a deepening mystery and tremendous emotional punch. But does the denouement justify the storyline, the switching positions we are forced to adopt about Kyle's sanity and the existence of her daughter? Or is it simply a story that cashes in on current passenger apprehension over hijacking and Foster's considerable acting talent? Foster is at her best, an outraged, highly intelligent woman with a mother's bottled up and barely contained grief providing simmering emotional force.

It is a remarkable testament to Foster's talent that she can carry such an unlikely story. She imbues the confined space of an aircraft with an energy that doesn't wilt for a moment and ensures our attention never flags. Ably assisted by Sean Bean as the Captain, wanting to give her every benefit of doubt but increasingly forced to accept the evidence of his own eyes, and Air Marshall Peter Sarsgaard who plays an interesting yet inscrutable character, we are mesmerised by Kyle Pratt and our own difficulty in knowing whether to believe her. Whether the story was worthy of such talent is less clear. As the pieces unravel we are presented with a bewildering complexity of background information which, without Foster to carry it or Hitchcockian logic to prove it, we are tempted to dismiss with Flightplan as overambitious. As an exercise in powerful acting that stands up as a Saturday night thriller, Flightplan delivers in Club Class, but as the sum of its parts it is as convoluted and full of wishful thinking as someone trying to stretch out in Economy.