You know what movie people have just negatively judged from the trailers and is surprisingly fun? Plane, a movie that brings us Gerard Butler as Brodie Torrance, a once great pilot now flying for Trailblazer Airlines. The smaller company has flights going out of Singapore to other major cities, and when Torrance is set to fly a New Year’s Eve flight, he is given a prisoner named Louis Gaspare (Luke Cage’s Mike Colter) to take with him.
The small flight is told to go ahead even thought there’s a storm, and when the plane is hit by lighting, Brodie and his copilot Dele (Yonson An) manage to give their passengers a safe landing—just not in the best place. The movie is a story about survival that works because Brodie and Gaspare form a trusting bond with each other, despite Gaspare’s introduction to the story, and it is a pleasantly fun time?
When you think about Butler’s career, most now talk about his action movies. They’re fine and fun, but they are movies that your parents probably watch and that’s it. With Plane, I went into it thinking, “It’s one of those movies,” but came out shocked by how much fun I actually had. And it’s because the film does a great job at playing with the archetypes of the characters presented.
Louis and Brodie are best friends
The passengers of the Trailerblazer plane are, for the most part, useless—not in a horrible way, but it works because you don’t expect them to jump in and save the day. For many of them, they are just people trying to get to their next destination. They are pretty much just an incentive for Brodie to get them all off the island safely.
But the bread and butter of Plane comes from Butler and Colter’s ability to bounce off each other, and it is surprising. It’s not one of those pairings where you wouldn’t instantly know that they’d be great together, and yet, Butler’s gruffness matches incredibly well with Colter’s humor, and the two make for an unlikely pair of believable allies.
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It would have been so easy to make this a movie where Butler is just a hero all on his own, but Plane makes sure to balance the bad-assery between both Colter and Butler. At the same time, the movie isn’t changing the genre, but it is almost a return to the action feel of the early ’00s that seemed to go away for a few years.
Now, we can explore movies like Plane, which is truly just one of those movies that is fun and something to suspend your disbelief with for a while.
(featured image: Lionsgate)
