Bill Marks (Liam Neeson) is an alcoholic struggling with some personal demons. Non-Stop, the newest film from director Juame Collet-Serra (2011’s Unknown), opens with Marks sitting in his car at an airport. He slowly pours a dark brown liquid into his coffee, tosses back a deep sip, and leaves the vehicle, heading towards the airport. Despite being a complete lush, Marks (like all other recent Neeson characters, from Taken to The Grey) is anything but oblivious to his surroundings. He walks through the airport, noticing different passengers and their traits as they head to their own gates. Although the film trying to keep the information hidden from the audience, it is apparent that Marks, based on his mannerisms, is indeed an air marshal in charge of a particular transatlantic flight headed for London.
Once aboard and in air, Bill receives numerous text messages to his secure air marshal cellphone, informing him that someone will die every 20 minutes unless $150 million dollars is wired into an account. Paranoia takes over the entire flight as the rest of the passengers soon suspect Bill himself to be the culprit. Even his friends on the ground no longer trust him and soon, the entire world thinks Bill is highjacking the plane for his own financial gain.
The film takes a bold step of exploring life on a highjacked plane in a post-9/11 world and the audience is sure to feel the tension during the first half of the film. During the latter half, however, the fuselage holding the plot together quickly comes undone once the reasons behind this mystery are exposed.
Non-Stop was produced by Joel Silver, a man who owned the 80s by being partially responsible for such classics like Lethal Weapon, and Die Hard. Each of those films also dealt with similar themes (anti-heroes with alcohol problems, terrorism, robberies, etc.). Only when the motivation behind the antagonists was finally revealed, audiences could immediately sympathize a little bit, even though we still clapped when Mel Gibson beat the crap of them or when Bruce Willis tossed them off a really tall building. The logic behind this caper provides nothing of the sort. Instead, you might walk out of the theater trying to bury your anger at its idiocy.
The script is written by three first-time feature-length screenwriters (John W. Richardson, Christopher Roach, and Ryan Engle) who all seemed to lose confidence in their own story as they progressed through the narrative. They make the events unfold almost way too perfectly, as nothing in the planning of the event ever seems to go wrong for the person or persons in charge of the actual robbery. Who is to say that there aren’t some flights better off missed, just like Non-Stop is a cinematic experience best skipped, unless your weekend plans don’t call for much else.
5/10
