Film review: Flight

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. On behalf of the flight crew I’d like to welcome you aboard” are important words. Not for their meaning, but their tone: as we fasten our seatbelts and nervously prepare to be hurtled through the air in a metal tube, we want calm authority. We don’t want a coked-up drunk with a chaotic personal life rolling in from an all-night bender with one of the cabin crew.

But this is the premise of Flight. Suspend your disbelief that an intoxicated pilot would be allowed to take the controls of a commercial airliner (a Tarom flight was cancelled last month after “routine checks” at Heathrow found the pilot to be drunk). Because this is just the first of a slew of implausibilities in the film.

So, in the cockpit for fictional airline SouthJet we have an alcoholic paired with a religious freak of a co-pilot who believes that air disasters are God’s will (SouthJet really needs to look at its hiring policies). A series of technical failures and difficult weather conditions threaten catastrophe, with which our inebriated airman Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) copes brilliantly against all the odds – even though he is trashed.

As the incident is investigated, Whip romances a heroin addict (Kelly Reilly). Naturally she is from the Hollywood school of female heroin addicts (think Jennifer Connelly in Requiem for a Dream), namely stunning with perfect skin and in apparent good health, free of the gauntness, sunken eyes, bruises and hair loss that heroin addiction actually causes. No matter, let’s go with it.

Both the media and the National Transportation Safety Board are sniffing around, but Whip has been provided with a weasel lawyer (Don Cheadle) who might be able to get him off – even though his blood test showed he flew a plane while off his face. Meanwhile, as Whip wrestles with profound things like responsibility, saving his career and rebuilding his relationship with his estranged son, up pops John Goodman as his dealer, essentially reprising his role from The Big Lebowski and looking like he’s wandered in from a different film entirely.

Flight hits the same turbulence as other entries in the “don’t do drugs, kids” genre: the characters may come to bad ends through their drug use, but merely by depicting attractive actors consuming narcotics to high-energy music a mixed message is sent out. The major twists are largely predictable and the movie has an uneven feel with superfluous sections.

Two things rescue it. One is the depiction of the stricken flight, viscerally intense scenes that will resonate with any antsy flyer – leave at least two weeks between seeing this film and any air travel. The second is Washington, few of whose films are a totally wasted view. Whatever the flaws of the plot, he turns in a classy performance as a man wrestling with his demons, worthy of the Oscar nomination he secured. Flight may be doomed but Denzel’s still flying high.