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Nice soundbites, Sam!
SNAKES ON A PLANE
Directed by David R. Ellis
Certificate 15
Thankfully, a film with as simple and some might say silly plot is exactly both things: simple and silly. But this is no bad thing.
Snakes On A Plane borrows from just about every B movie you can imagine and then shlocks the action up a notch.
Let’s get this straight: Snakes is as predictable as they come. But, strangely, its very weaknesses – obvious plot, given away brilliantly by the title which was insisted on by hero Samuel L Jackson when he realised what a stir it was causing on websites – is also its strength.
This film give you a dose of Americana self-help philosophising that so many summer films seem to try to do. It’s basically a hairy old mile-high adventure.
Jackson is the FBI agent Neville Flynn who is transporting laid-back surfer dude witness Sean Jones (Nathan Phillips) to testify against gangster Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson).
But this is an imaginative baddie: instead of trying the usual Hollywood way of escaping justice – what’s wrong with hiring a hit man, I wonder? – he plumps for a far more original and definitely more entertaining scheme. A crate full of drugged-up killer slitherers are packed in the hold: and when the crate doors swing open, passengers and crew have a real problem on their hands.
We have a motley collection of travellers, and you never quite know whose going to get a nibble from the various rapacious fangs first.
The British snob character got my vote. He deserved it for kicking up a fuss when asked to move from first class to make way for our hero. But it was the couple who got the hots for each other and headed for the toilet who meet a grisly end before every one else.
The snakes are not good flyers, and soon enough have caused enough mayhem for the flight to be in danger of coming down somewhere between Hawaii and Los Angeles.
But Mr Kim had not reckoned with Samuel L Jackson’s Flynn. This is a fine performance – he takes his role ultra seriously, and is all the more amusing for it. His line, already entering folklore film parlance, “I’ve had it with these m************ snakes on this m************ plane” was eagerly awaited by the audience, cheered when uttered and mimicked in the lobby afterwards. And it wasn’t the only silly soundbite: the script is littered with them, such as the uncontestable advice: “Do as I say, and you’ll live.” Everyone in the cinema nodded in agreement when Jackson uttered these lines, with the odd heckle of “tell it, bro”, and other such shouts of encouragement.
And then his problem-solving ability to despatch with the snakes in a number of ways also brought hoots from the crowds.
That is what this flick is: a good old-fashioned crowd-pleaser. It’s us against the animal kingdom, and Samuel L Jackson is just the man to show them who’s boss. |
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