Fly Away

Director Robert Zemeckis, the man who helmed my all-time favorite film, Back to the Future, has spent the last decade making animated movies instead. His hellishly creepy motion capture techniques have resulted in The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol. But last year he finally returned to live action with the movie Flight.

Denzel Washington earned an Oscar nomination for this film about a cocky airline pilot whose struggles with alcoholism are brought to the forefront when he manages to land a plane in spectacular fashion after it suffers a mechanical malfunction. I heard a few murmurs that the film was quite good, and decided to throw it into my Netflix queue. Subsequently, I heard another opinion (from a source I generally trust) that the movie was actually pretty terrible. But I'd forgotten it was sitting there in the queue... right at the top, as luck would have it. Before I could think of removing it, there it was in my mailbox.

Flight has a truly gripping opening 20 minutes. The airplane crash sequence is harrowing and intense. Even knowing that the plane must land at least relatively safely (or else you have no movie to follow), you're pulled to the edge of your seat and caught up in what's unfolding. It doesn't all seem entirely plausible after the fact, when you have a moment to think about it, but it looks and feels credible enough as you're watching it.

But the second opinion was right on this movie. The problem is, Flight is not a movie about a spectacular crash. It is, as I said, a movie about an alcoholic. And the rest of the film is a plodding and pedestrian treatment of the subject. Loaded with boring cliché, the movie has nothing to say that hasn't been said more effectively in countless other movies. Plenty of actors turn out to say it, though. Besides Denzel Washington, there are supporting turns from John Goodman, Don Cheadle, Bruce Greenwood, and Melissa Leo. But the script is too lifeless for them to lift it up into much.

I was barely able to make it to the end of the film, and wasn't sure once I did why I'd stuck it through. I'd give Flight a boring D-.