"Plane": two-paragraph review

L to R: Chief Bonnie (Pineda), Captain Torrance (Butler), FO Dele (An), Torrance, and Louis Gaspare (Colter)

As much as I ended up liking 2023's "Plane," directed by Jean-François Richet, it's not worth more than a two-paragraph review. Starring Gerard Butler, Mike Colter (Mr. Luke Cage himself), Yoson An, Tony Goldwyn, Daniela Pineda, and Evan Dane Taylor, "Plane" is the story of a passenger airliner, Trailblazer Airlines Flight 119, that gets routed through a severe storm, suffers damage, and is forced to land on a peripheral island in the Philippines swarming with militants and rebels. Captain Brodie Torrance (Butler) and his copilot Sam Dele (An), miraculously manage to bring the plane down intact on a jungle road. But with the plane's main power shorted out thanks to a lightning strike, and no local cell service, no one can call out for help. Complicating matters is a prisoner on board the flight: Louis Gaspare (Colter), who was supposed to be transferred to Canada. The air marshal guarding Gaspare gets killed during the turbulent landing, along with one of the flight crew. Given the desperate situation, and having learned about about Gaspare's background in the French Foreign Legion, Captain Torrance decides to let Gaspare free, and the two go in search of a facility the plane had flown over in hopes of finding land-line communication. This leaves copilot Dele and chief flight attendant Bonnie (Pineda) to both care for the remaining dozen passengers (it was a light New Year's flight) and try to restore power to the plane. Meanwhile, in the States, a rescue operation is mounted using mercenaries because of the anarchic nature of the island where the plane went down. Back on the island, the passengers, Bonnie, and Dele are taken hostage by local militants led by the very angry Datu Junmar (Taylor), so Torrance, having finally contacted civilization with partial success, makes it his mission to rescue the hostages before they get shipped off to an unknown-but-likely-horrible fate. Gaspare elects to help. 

The movie is tightly paced, and the tension remains ratcheted pretty high throughout. The action scenes are occasionally bloody, and there's some CGI spatter, but much of the violence is of the more intimate type—close-in grappling, knives to the throat and torso, that sort of thing. The respectful brothers-in-arms dynamic between Captain Torrance and Louis Gaspare—both military veterans—keeps the movie from becoming too cartoonish, and the secondary players, like Chief Bonnie and First Officer Dele, are written to be smart and competent. It's always good to watch professionals keeping their heads under pressure. The movie makes a point of showing that the group's members have to help each other to get out of the situation, with the mercenaries finally swooping in to allow Captain Torrance his final act of heroism. This is not a particularly intelligent or deep film, and with such a large cast of characters, some are inevitably going to feel flat (like Torrance's daughter and the main villain), but the story still entertained the hell out of me. Maybe I'm just easily pleased. Then again, for people who are hypersensitive to racial and ethnic politics, there's an early scene in which two of the Korean passengers aboard the plane get killed by the Filipino rebels. I'm aware that Korean tourists are viewed somewhat dimly in the Philippines for being loud, arrogant, drunk, and overly demanding—something often said about American tourists in other contexts. So there might be a smidgen of ethnic-cultural subtext woven into the movie's plot. Oh, and remind me never to visit Jolo Island, Sulu Province, in the Philippines. I've seen what they do to ignorant tourists there, and I don't want to end up becoming someone's lechon.