Plane 2023 Movie Review
Director: Jean-François Richet
Screenplay By: Charles Cumming and J. P. Davis
Cast: Gerard Butler, Mike Colter, Yoson An, and Tony Goldwyn Streaming: Theater
Synopsis:
The plot centers around a pilot (Butler) allying with a prisoner (Colter) to save his passengers from a hostile territory they landed in for an emergency landing.
Plane 2023 Movie Review:
I love Gerard Butler – 300, Law Abiding Citizen, Den of Thieves, The Ugly Truth, Hunter Killer, P.S. I Love You, Machine Gun Preacher, A Family Man, Greenland, and Olympus Has Fallen are I liked films of him.
There are few Actors in Hollywood, who pulls the audiences into the theater, even if it is low budget or high budget – The name is enough. Gerard Butler is one of them. Olympus Has Fallen (Tamil Dubbed) is the first Butler film I watched in the theater.
I went made during the action sequences and dialogues. Even before Olympus, I watched 300 and The Ugly Truth on TV (Star Movies or Movies Now or HBO) many times. Even though his films get mixed or negative, still I love his films because movies are not for critics – Only for audiences.
Example: London Has Fallen (2016) is the lowest score in the fallen series, but if you watch the film on a big screen – I guarantee you – you come out 100% satisfied. That’s Gerard’s magic. He won’t disappoint us. The last few films are not well received by critics but have done decent box office.
When the first official trailer of PLANE was released on YouTube on 26th October, Immediately I added the film to my watch list. The trailer gave a few chill moments and I know what I’m going to get in the film but It’s Gerard Butler Film. So, Ticked Booked on Jan 27th at Luxe Cinema, Chennai.
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First 40 Minutes is My Favorite Part of the Film:
The film starts with Gerard rushing into the Airport while talking to his daughter. Gerard as Brodie Torrance, a Pilot, a former RAF pilot, flies Trailblazer Airlines Flight 119 from Singapore to Honolulu via Tokyo. Before he took off the plane, a fugitive homicide suspects Louis Gaspare boards with an RCMP officer.
Brodie notices the weather change and asks for another route but the higher Dept rejects it and asks Brodie to stay on the same course to save 18k fuel if they take an alternate route. The plane takes off.
While en route, lightning and thunder hit the plane and the plane loses its power and goes dark. The 15-minute episode is outstanding. The way they captured and directed is outstanding. I got Goosebumps in the theater when watching the sequence.
Brodie makes an emergency landing in a jungle in the Philippines. Everything was melted by lightning. So, Brodie decides to find somebody and seek help, so he goes with Gaspare.
Till Now, the movie is good. Later, it becomes a typical Gerard Butler movie. In the poster, you can see Mike Colter (Luke Cage Fame) along with Gerard Butler.
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But in the film he was underutilized – he was here and there, and few action scenes for him. Any time Colter is onscreen the movie has unexpected energy. Saying this may seem like an insult to star Butler, but the ultimate problem is that all the characters, especially Butler, seem underdeveloped and cliched.
There is rarely a moment where the audience is surprised by the motivations or development of the characters. While the film is never terrible by any means, it’s hard to heartily recommend a movie that has such paper-thin characterizations.
The plane has its charms. If nothing else, it’s consistent in tone as an action thriller. It is never too campy or too self-serious. At the same time, it never rises above a mid-tier, middle-budget adventure.
The action is competently shot yet rarely very exciting and supporting performances from reliable actors like Tony Goldwyn, Joey Slotnick, and Paul Ben-Victor are better than the film probably deserves.
The plot is never surprising. and the real problem in this film is the emotional connection. We never care or feel the characters that are in dangerous situations because of the proper settings and real danger (suspense).
It’s so never made clear what our villains are doing on the island, we see people getting led away off the island and see some people being held hostage as ransom, but we’re never told who’s paying for these ransoms or why and makes the film feel like it’s unfinished.
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The worst aspect of this film, however, is a boring long-drawn outside plot with the corporation that owns the type of plane that crashed talking about the plane’s disappearance, even though it contributes nothing to the story and is merely there to pad out the runtime.
I watched Jean-François Richet movies before. Assault on Precinct 13 (2005), Mesrine (2008, Favorite), Blood Father (2016), and The Emperor of Paris (2018). The plane is his worst movie.
The cinematography is good, and the background score is okay – feels like a 90’s film score. Gerard Butler has had a bit of a tough go since 300 made him a household name. That movie remains his most iconic, with him seeming to flounder a bit around a whole bunch of action roles and some against-type films that fared even worse.
Here, we see him once again in action mode and it’s sad to see that it’s yet another disposable action flick in which he gets to play the hero in a subpar action film. After watching Plane, I feel cheated out of the movie I was expecting to see.
The trailers advertised an action thriller with Gerard Butler Die Hard-ing as a pilot who finds himself an unlikely hero who joins forces with an ex-military killing machine in mowing down dangerous radicals after a commercial plane accidentally lands on an island populated with them.
Unfortunately, what I got instead was a confused and incomplete mess that has a plot so basic and unoriginal you’ll probably forget everything that happened in it after a few days.
Verdict: Plane 2023 Movie Review
Underwhelming. I don’t fault anyone for wanting to seek out Plane, and I think everyone involved wanted to deliver an entertaining flick, but the end result is a strictly mediocre time waster with just a few moments of genuine excitement.
