Everyone's a suspect

Film review Non-Stop (12a)
Running time 106 minutes
Rating:**
AIRPLANES, together with trains, sinking ships, lifts, and most particularly the isolated country house, have long been a favourite of movie directors who prefer to keep their actors on a tight rein. Legendary Hollywood director John Ford once said that you didn’t want to allow actors move around a lot, “otherwise they think they’re important”. In this style more recently, cinemagoers have been offered Redeye, United 93 and Snakes on a Plane, and even Flight of the Phoenix just about qualifies. The latest is Non-Stop, featuring Liam Neeson playing a bit of a bully on a plane, and a character who is either trying to hijack it, or save it from a terrorist – depending on your point of view. Given Neeson’s track record playing tough, rough, but essentially good-hearted old coves, I know which one most of us would bet on emerging at the end of the story, but we could be in for a surprise. Neeson plays US air marshal Bill Marks, flying from New York to London on a plane belonging to a fictional British airline. When he begins to receive messages on his secure phone telling him that passengers are going to start dying pretty soon, he goes into action and people begin to die, including a fellow US air marshal. As with many a drama depicted in a confined space, the dramatic technique is brought to bear where everyone looks like a suspect, none more so than Marks himself who has a divorce, a dead child, a drink problem and bad facial hair working against him. As the bodies begin to pile up, so too does the evidence that he is the bad guy. However, seeds of doubt are sown through the presence of a helpful passenger, Jen Summers (Julianne Moore), who begins to trust him, while Neeson’s gruff honesty begins to get to work on flight attendant Nancy (Michelle Dockery). For many real-life airline passengers, it does not take much in the way of drama to get the pulses racing – a slight jolt on take-off does can do it for me. The unfortunate passengers on this fictional flight have several deaths, a bomb, a dead crew member and too many people men wandering around with guns to cope with. It’s amazing that they tolerated the goings on with some incidents of bad temper and the occasional screaming fit. Director Jaume Collet-Serra (House of Wax) keeps the tension ratio high – although for me the main villain was blindingly obvious and should have been chained up in the terminal lavatory awaiting the officers of the law before getting anywhere near the departure lounge. If you ignore some of the clumsy narrative gaps, principally a really weak explanation as to what really motivated the bad guys) audiences can still enjoy Non-Stop for Neeson’s performance, although at times he seems to be cruising at 30,000ft but in third gear.