Plane (2023)

               I resisted the charms of Gerard Butler for as long as I could, but I think I’m finally a fan.  The clincher was reading up on the production of this movie and finding out that Butler himself was the one who insisted that the movie be called ‘Plane.’  The only reason I took notice of this movie at all was because of the post-ironic online buzz about that one-word title.  The actual movie is, for most of its runtime, a great deal better than that one word implies, although it does fully justify such a schlocky title by the end.

Plain.

              My first note when watching the movie was a happy little sentence celebrating that Butler got to use his actual Scottish accent.  It’s likely a coincidence that the original 2016 pitch was from fellow Scot Charles Cumming.  Cumming has been writing spy novels since 2001 and this is his first produced screenplay.  His original version was then worked on by J. P. Davis, who’s had a sporadic career bouncing between acting and writing.  After getting noticed with his first movie, ‘Fighting Tommy Riley’ in 2004, Davis wrote the 2007 Mathew Modine romantic comedy ‘The Neighbor’ and the 2022 Chris Pine action movie ‘The Contractor,’ which I was completely unaware existed.  If I had to guess, and I do because I don’t know the answer, I suspect the original screenplay ended in less of a batshit way and Davis was hired to put it over the top.

              Director Jean-François Richet was previously unknown to me, but I liked a lot of his work here.  He did the 2005 ‘Assault on Precinct 13’ remake, which I’ve heard mixed things about, a number of French films, and a 2016 Mel Gibson vehicle called ‘Blood Father.’  I think we have ourselves a professional director for hire, which has its own kind of integrity.  With the exception of that third act and one action scene, his directorial style throughout is understated and unobtrusive.  He does a good job of establishing spaces and character relations, he uses close-ups judiciously (and correctly), he does some subtle stuff with dolly shots and framing to tell stories within scenes, it’s decent work.

              But this movie belongs to Butler, who increasingly is the only guy out there making these kinds of films.  Genre fare with budgets under $50 million should be the absolute backbone of every major studio.  Blumhouse and A24 have rapidly built entire empires out of these kinds of movies, and the executives at the other companies seem to finally be paying attention.  There are the huge tentpole releases, the piles of cheap slush that make up the VOD and streaming channels, and in between there’s this gaping hole where an entire industry should be.

              In just the last five years Butler has acted in ten movies.  Excluding the Netflix original (for which I don’t have financials), the average budget across those movies is $42.2 million with box office returns of $100.5 million.  Take out the third ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ movie and it’s still a respectable $31.4 million budget to $47.3 million box office ratio.  That is a track record of profitability.  Every flop like ‘Kandahar’ gets offset by an unexpected success like ‘Den of Thieves.’  This is how you build a brand.  Gerard Butler has been in some huge movies, some of them good (‘300,’ the aforementioned ‘Dragon’ movies), many bad (… I mean just so many), but for the past decade or so he seems to have found his groove as a mid-budget Action Dad, with movies like the ‘Fallen’ films, ‘Greenland,’ and especially ‘Copshop.’  A lot of actors want to be the biggest stars in the world, with fancy premieres and worldwide publicity tours, but some actors just want to work.  Attaching the name Gerard Butler to a project gets movies made because his face on the poster reliably puts butts in seats.

              I spent most of the runtime of this movie being pleasantly surprised.  The entire first act is a textbook example of how to establish characters and tone.  Nothing this movie does is original, it’s all variations on tropes, but it does them well.  We meet Butler’s character, Captain Torrance, as he’s rushing to board his plane.  We hurriedly establish that it’s New Year’s Eve and he wants to make it back in time to see his daughter, who actually wants to see him.  The first ten minutes or so introduces us to the rest of the crew, emphasizes a few key passengers, and establishes that they’ll be transporting a recovered fugitive for part of the flight.  What’s key here is that all of this is done fluidly and naturally.  One of the flight attendants knows Torrance and is happy to be flying with him again, which lets the audience know that he’s an all right guy.  He’s friendly and professional with everyone and reacts reasonably to being informed about the fugitive.  Before the turbulence starts about twelve minutes in we have everything we need to know for the rest of the movie.

              The movie is very carefully constructed in a way I appreciated.  We know going in that is a movie about a plane crash, so I was looking forward to seeing how they were going to justify the crash and have it not be the captain’s fault.  Turns out I was right to clock the stuffy bureaucrat earlier who overrode Torrance’s concerns about a storm because they get struck by a bolt of lightning, frying the electronics.  Torrance wasn’t even in the cockpit when it happened, he was in the back checking on the passengers (an IMDB trivia note is very angry about how inaccurate this is).  This means that when he heroically lands the plane at the end of the first act we don’t have to have that offset in any way by it being caused by anything he did.

              What’s interesting about the middle of this movie is how non-schlocky it is.  The questionable realism of a plane ever successfully pulling off an emergency landing with no electrical system on a dirt road aside, everything in this next stretch is carefully non-melodramatic.  A couple of the passengers are loud assholes, but that’s how they were introduced at the beginning and they never do more than complain.  For the most part the crew and passengers are reasonable and level-headed.  The fugitive, the cop accompanying him having died in the crash, simply waits in handcuffs for the captain to decide what to do with him.  He’s surprised when Torrance decides to take him along when he goes to look for help, but he’s entirely agreeable.

              Considering we were almost 45 minutes into the movie at this point and we hadn’t had a single massive gunfight, I had to start reconsidering what kind of movie this was.  What rocked me back on my heels was a simple moment at minute 33:50, when Torrance goes back on the plane one last time before heading off to look for help.  He carefully takes a blanket off of the dead flight attendant and is visibly devastated.  The camera allows him to take a few shaky moments before he gathers himself and he starts to put the corpses in body bags.  All that was necessary, from a plot perspective, was the captain getting access to the dead cop’s gun and files, but this movie took a couple of moments to underline what we knew about Torrance: he’s a good man who’s not used to this kind of thing but he’s doing his best and powering through.  He’s concerned about others and determined to keep his passengers safe.  The movie didn’t have to do that but it chose to.  That’s not a schlocky choice.

              It’s important for us to believe that Torrance is the kind of person who automatically feels responsible for the safety of his passengers because otherwise a lot of his actions don’t make a whole lot of sense.  He’s not in charge in any legal sense, the only reason the crew and passengers defer to him on the ground is either they haven’t stopped to think or, and this is what the movie is persuading us is going on, he’s just a natural leader and they can tell he’s going to do his best for them.

              Torrance and the fugitive warily team up and make their way to try to contact the airline.  The fugitive is a former member of the French Foreign Legion named Louis Gaspare who explains his murder charge as simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He’s played by Mike Colter, who is most famous as Luke Cage but who I know as Lemond Bishop from “The Good Wife.”  He could have easily played his character as brooding and angry, looming on the periphery the entire time until it’s suddenly revealed he’s actually a good guy, but instead Colter plays him as carefully neutral.  He’s not aggressive with anyone (except for one of the asshole passengers who suddenly films him, which fair enough) but nor is he friendly.  He’s matter-of-fact at all times and never turns into a friend to Torrance.  He’s very professional about taking lives, is always clear he does not intend to be rescued along with the others, and ends the movie stealing the cash reserve of the mercenaries hired to rescue them.  He’s a cool, professional foil to Torrance’s heart-on-his-sleeve captain.  Gaspare is the one always talking him out of stupid plans or sacrificing himself.  It’s a nice double-act, and it’ll be interesting how they recreate it without Butler for the already announced spin-off movie, ‘Ship.’  Not a joke.

              Before we get to the third act … thing, I should mention the one-take action scene that’s the centerpiece of the movie.  Gaspare has ditched Torrance in the middle of the woods.  The captain has found an abandoned building and miraculously managed to get a phone line working.  He’s in the middle of giving his daughter their location information when one of the local criminals attacks him.  From minute 45:54 to 52:04, well over six minutes, we have an apparently unbroken shot as the two of them struggle and manhandle their way across a room.  It’s sloppy and upsetting as they grapple, and when Torrance eventually breaks the other man’s neck and heaves his body off of him the camera just watches his face gasp and contort for a a full fifteen seconds.  Meanwhile the soundtrack is a faint hint of strings and a faint heartbeat that increases in both volume and temp during the scene.  It’s pretty neat.

              The movie lost me at exactly 1:24:28, when Torrance announces that, in order to escape the mob of criminals chasing after them, he’s going to fly them off of the island with the downed plane.  The movie did a decent job of setting up over the course of act two, establishing that they’d repaired the electrical system so that’s fine so far as it goes, but the rest of it had been hanging together just fine until this nonsense.  Mind you, I’m grading on quite a curve here considering how artificial this basic setup is.  As they heroically start up the plane, the various mercenaries managing to make it on board and Gaspare grabbing the money and running, I was all set to write this movie off as an interesting failure, until the movie won me right back at 1:33:42.  This is when Torrance, with the aid of Gaspare, manages to kill the main villain from the rest of the movie by hitting him with the plane’s landing gear.  Guy was about to shoot them with a rocket launcher, it was a real close call.  First the movie nosedived into boring schlock but then it went so far down it came back out the other side as fun schlock.  I still would have preferred a more realistic ending, but I’ll take fun nonsense with characters I like.

              And I think that’s the surprising takeaway from this: I really liked Gerard Butler in this.  Looking back on his filmography, it’s only now dawning on me that this is the first actual movie I’ve watched that he’s starred in.  Other than the ‘Dragon’ movies, I’ve never sat down and watched one of his films before.  I’ve seen clips of plenty of them, maybe shuffled past a few of them back when I still had cable, I’ve seen his face so much for so long that I guess I just assumed I’d seen him in something by this point.  The movie uses this likability, of course, there’s the reason he’s the lead, and it lets it do some clever things.  Going into this movie we know that Torrance and Gaspare are going to team up, it’s the hook, so when it’s time for that part of the movie to start it has Butler’s character proactively decide to team up with him.  In too many other movies they would have had to waste time finding some contrived way to finagle them together, instead Torrance just decides the two of them are going to team up.  For an audience member this does two things: we’re slightly surprised and delighted to have our expectations exceeded, and we then transfer that surge of good feeling onto the character that caused that emotion.  It’s a feedback loop of likability: we liked him in the first place, then his actions reinforce it, rinse and repeat.  Plenty of better-trained fighters are decent actors but don’t have nearly as big or consistent a career as Butler, and I think it’s due to that inherent likability.  They squandered it for a while on romantic comedies, but I think everyone is happy now that he’s settled into his Action Dad years.