Two-fisted airline pilot Brodie Torrance (Gerard Butler) doesn’t have a great time. Ordered to pilot his half-empty smallish passenger plane through a storm, the plane gets struck by lightning, forcing him to apply some minor heroics to land it. Alas, he does land on a Filipino island in the hand of separatists who have made a habit out of kidnapping foreigners for ransom and would be quite happy to acquire a plane full of those foreigners without having to go through much effort. So Torrance, together the obligatory murderer with a soldier background (Mike Colter) who was supposed to be transported to the US on the plane as a prisoner have to do some killing, some running, and some bad planning to save the day.
Our old frenemy Boring Competence strikes again. There’s nothing really wrong with Jean-François Richet’s action movie – well, apart from nobody involved applying any thought to anything in the script because laziness rules. There’s definitely not much really right with it either. Pacing, acting, dialogue, camera, editing, and so on, and so forth are all there and handled in a professional manner, but there’s nothing here that has any shine, nothing that dares to be good or bad in any interesting way. The action scenes aren’t terribly well edited, but not so badly as to ever become interesting in that way, either.
There’s a joylessness to the whole affair’s professionalism that really kills it for me as anything of any actual entertainment value. Nothing to see here but people doing their jobs, but mostly waiting for the time when they’ll be getting off work to drink away their pay checks.
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