Flight is the first live-action film from director Robert Zemeckis in over 10 years, having wandered around for most of that time in a directorial wilderness of motion capture creatures and performances with the likes of The Polar Express, A Christmas Carol and Beowulf. Now the Forrest Gump and Cast Away director returns to the real world and finds himself on initially spectacular but ultimately just solid ground.
The film starts off with an alarmingly bold scene of Denzel Washington waking up in a hotel room, surrounded by a mess of drugs and alcohol and with a rather gratuitous use of female nudity. We soon find out, however, that Washington is in fact a pilot and the woman he’s with is a member of his cabin crew. This is an indicator for us to buckle up and sit up straight – we’re in for a bumpy ride.
The first 30 mins or so of Flight is fantastic as we see the before, during and after of an ill-fated plane journey in which Captain “Whip” Whitaker (Washington) has to somehow land a plane which appears to have faulted thousands of feet in the air. This includes attempting a daring move of turning the plane upside down and trying to safely (considering the circumstances) crash land it into an open field. From then on Whip has to deal with his new found fame as well as the fact that he was inebriated while flying the plane.
Nervous flyers beware as Zemeckis really captures the shock and horror of what it would be like to be in a plane when it’s falling from the sky, complete with bags falling from the overhead compartments, people being sick and the pilot scrambling to save the day just as the audience is left scrambling at the arms of their seat.
Once that astonishing sequence is over and done with the film both literally and metaphorically has its feet on solid ground, never quite reaching the heights of what it’s achieved at the beginning. What follows is a slightly generic tale of one man trying to attain some sort of redemption and fight off the demons of his alcohol problem. It just feels like we’ve seen this sort of things dozens of times before with the only difference here being is we’ve never quite seen it in the context of a (anti)hero pilot saving almost a 100 people from dying in a plane crash.
The pace of the film slows right down and never really speeds up again (the hefty 138 minute runtime doesn’t help matters), focusing a lot on the relationship between Whip and an unfeasibly glamorous recovering drug addict played by Kelly Reilly. Her character isn’t written all that well and that becomes a problem when so much of the film hinges on her and Washington’s problematic relationship. The rather misjudged will-they-won’t-they romance subplot distracts from the natural drama of the story and is never really resolved in a satisfying way.
What elevates the film, then, is the central performance by Washington, whose already been Oscar nominated for it. He’s one of those people who manages to be as much a versatile actor as he is an audience-drawing movie star and here he combines both rather perfectly into a role that could have been showy – and in some ways is because he is always in the spotlight even with the likes of John Goodman, Don Cheadle and Bruce Greenwood attempting to steal the show – but is incredibly moving and actually rather subtle in ways that the film otherwise isn’t; musical cues such as The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter or Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ Under the Bridge are terribly on-the-nose, for example. Washington gives the proceedings a lot of gravitas and ensures that even in its more derivative or slower moments, Flight is a sufficiently compelling dose of Hollywood drama though one that never quite gets out of the shadow of its spectacular take off.
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