The others including the pilot do not take this anonymous threat seriously, but Marks intuitively senses that he and others are placed in a very dangerous situation, and, of course, he is right about that.
According to the messages, a passenger will be killed right after 20 minutes, and that will happen again every 20 minutes unless $150 million is transferred to a certain bank account. When you have a prominent actress like Julianne Moore as a woman who just happens to sit next to Neeson, it does not take a second for us to guess that her character will be one of the crucial elements in the story no matter what happens in the end, and there are some recognizable performers including Scoot McNairy, Michelle Dockery, Corey Stoll, Nate Parker, and Lupita Nyong’o, a beautiful newcomer who worked in this film right after her heartbreaking Oscar-winning performance in “12 Years a Slave”(2013) and will probably not get roles more inconsequential than this in her bright future career.Įverything looks like his ordinary work day to Marks at first, but, around two hours after the takeoff, he receives suspicious text messages through his secure smartphone. While getting to know a bit about his personal problems including alcoholism and his young daughter, we are also introduced to several supporting characters who board on a plane to London with him, and lots of possibilities are spread around them even before the plane takes off. You can’t possibly mess with Neeson under any circumstance, you know. Neeson has recently been our man for all those gritty B-action flicks since he appeared in “Taken”(2008), and you may admire how this talented 61-year-old actor still looks believably forceful and vulnerable even in his routine paycheck roles like this. Our hero is a federal air marshal named Bill Marks, and we instantly see that this gloomy tough guy is going through very, very hard time thanks to the natural gray gravitas exuded from Liam Neeson’s performance. Let’s talk about the story itself, which is not so convincing even if you are willing to suspend your disbelief which will rapidly be accumulated minute by minute. So, I guess it is never expected that our hero will find the bomb hidden in the plane, but then why does it have to be equipped with that red digital readout from the beginning? As a matter of fact, even we do not need that at all because our hero has a digital wristwatch which can function as a timer as well as mine. At one point, the hero is notified through a smartphone that the bomb will explode after 30 minutes, and then the digital readout kindly appears on the screen and is immediately activated. Besides a bunch of stock characters who would be at home in Airport movies, we also have a typical flawed hero struggling with his personal demon and bound to be fallen into a deadly trap waiting for him, an insidiously goofy scheme which does not make lots of sense at all as you think more about it, an obligatory third-act scene which was once termed ‘underlying reality speech’ by Ebert, and, above all, that infamous thriller cliché which will amuse any seasoned movie audience in the world – RED DIGITAL READOUT!Īnd, believe or not, there are more than one digital readout in the movie. “Non-Stop” is one of such outrageous action films, and I believe it would tickle him to some degrees because of its breathless preposterousness decorated with many colorful goodies from his little movie glossary. I savored many of them whenever I encountered them, and I actually wanted to watch those films to share the fun with him as a fellow movie audience(and I usually did, by the way). He did not point them out just for blasting them in his reviews he was sometimes entertained by their dumb plot devices and typical clichés even when he did not like them enough, and he frequently made fun of them with sharp wits in his reviews.
One thing I miss about Roger Ebert is his witty amusement with action thriller movies which are full of preposterous plot holes big enough for a Boeing 777 plane to fly through.
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