Planes, Guns, Plots and Neeson

I saw Liam Neeson’s new film, Non-Stop, last week: the alcoholic, stumbling, abrasive cousin to Taken who has boarded a plane in a frankly inappropriate state and utterly forgot his manners—cussing, spilling red wine, ogling the flight attendants—before awkwardly passing out with the full complement of lolling head and half-closed bloodshot eyes before the jet even lands.

It was magnificently awful in a way that can only be true of action movies that try to dress themselves up in thriller-clever clothing, only to shed that nonsense when shit all too suddenly gets real, or the plot clearly slips out of the grasp of the players and it’s easier to shoot the plot (figuratively) in the face … in slow motion, whilst falling backwards, in the aisle.

Because, strangely, Non-Stop was actually sort of good for its first few acts, setting up a completely unrealistic, but nonetheless intriguing, level of suspense. The pacing was about right, the plane setting provided just the right amount of claustrophobia and helplessness, there were plenty of suspicious eyes/faces to become alarmed about, and Neeson wasn’t trying to disguise his Irish accent (when he does, he just sounds more Irish). Plus his character was a drunk, which, at least from my perspective, only made him more dangerous; more inclined to use his unique set of skills for intoxicated vengence. The plane was Neeson County and its inhabitants lived under Drunken Neeson Law. This was a plane I could side with and would've happily taken (accidental Neeson movie reference!) a ride on.

As it proceeded, setting up its murder-on-a-plane-could-it-be-terrorists-or-a-psychopath premise, the film kept on going back for second and third helpings of mystery and danger, heaping it ever higher, and (kind of) drawing me ever closer to the edge of my seat. Building, Non-Stop threw all these story elements in the air and the audience was left waiting with slightly bated breath for Neeson to explode and throw down ‘I will find you, and I will kill you’ style.

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(Bad ass - but, then, I'd expect no less from my father, albeit with a likely different set of 'skills.')
How was the film going to reconcile these odds and ends into a satisfying ending? What did they all have to do with the plot? How was Neeson going to cope? How was he going to fucking savagely break the neck of this mystery? Was he going to hurl it out the plane into oncoming plane traffic? Oh please let that be it, I muttered.

I watched the final act unfold with a set of feelings bordering on escaping as hysterical laughter and epic sighing disappointment, mingled with a critical understanding that Non-Stop just seemed to have no idea how to handle its thriller-angle, various machinations and the suspense it had so laboriously set up. It was like watching a juggler suddenly realise all those swords he had started juggling were indeed kind of sharp and he struggled with flipping one sword, let alone six. It fell apart in a deluge of idiotic dialogue (my favourite was when the bad guy yelled, ‘and it was all so easy,’ to which I wanted to respond, ‘nothing about your plot looked easy, in fact, if anything, I’d be proud of and loudly touting how meticulous your planning was to make this series of coincidences look like purposeful action’; there was also a ‘Smith! You son of a gun!’ included to make sure we all knew this was, indeed, an action movie, although I was tempted to remind them that Danny Glover surely has a patent on this kind of line), absurd plot twists and something about being disappointed in homeland/plane security post 9-11.

The worst part? I thought Neeson’s revenge fuelled flip out was really pathetically tame. Basically, it was limited to a flying slow motion head shot and, um, moral support for the pilot who had to crash-land the plane.

If I’d written this movie, I would’ve had Neeson throw both bad guys out the plane, take control of the plane, and fly it straight into them as they hurtled to Earth, using them as a rudimentary—perhaps, more symbolic—landing pad: they tried to ‘take’ his plane, and ruin it, well he’d make sure they were part of its safe arrival home. That’s Neeson Justice.

I expected more.

(PS. Watch Taken for the true Neeson experience and play the ‘taken’ game, where you try to use the word ‘taken’ in context as often as possible throughout the course of the film: ie. after a bad guy crashes his car when trying to launch of a platform in pursuit of Neeson: ‘I bet he wishes he hadn’t taken that short cut.’)