Let’s be honest: it takes a particular kind of foolhardy courage—or maybe the sweet-mad gambler’s spirit of the real movie-lover—to watch a disaster picture about a storm-tossed plane while you’re actually on one, ricocheting through the clouds. The world outside your window is rattling with electricity, each jolt of turbulence a drumroll for the next on-screen catastrophe, and all you’re braced for is to be tossed overboard by a couple of hours of mechanical clichés. But Jean-François Richet’s “Plane”—wrapped up in its 2023 action-thriller drag—delivers a jolt of its own: it lifts you right out of the seat-gripping dread and into something damn near rapturous. By the time Gerard Butler and Mike Colter are wrestling fate on a jungle runway, your heart isn’t just in your throat—it’s applauding.
I came in expecting the usual: a check-list of disaster-movie tropes, a few briefcases packed with expository dialogue, and a parade of passengers so bland you could swap them with those smiling faces in the airline safety video and lose nothing. “Plane,” instead, had the temerity to flirt with old-school craftsmanship. Richet has a magician’s touch for tension: he squeezes the suspense out, drop by drop, letting the audience bob on high anxiety before flicking on the afterburners. And the leads are not just walking action mannequins but the kind of world-weary, quietly desperate men you find in old noirs and John Ford westerns—if the saloon brawls had been relocated to a spinning fuselage.
Gerard Butler’s Brodie Torrance—yes, the name itself is practically an SOS in cinematic shorthand—is a battered, morally upright pilot with troubles circling both in the cockpit and at home. Butler, whose stubble is as reliable a special effect as any storm cloud, plays Torrance less as the invulnerable slab of granite action movies usually demand and more as someone actually shaken and a bit broken. He’s got that haunted, dogged way about him—like a man determined to land the plane because he suspects fate would otherwise have him flying with no destination forever.
Then there’s Mike Colter, a cool tectonic presence as Louis Gaspare—a convict who’s either the in-flight threat or the unexpected guardian angel, all depending on your altitude. Colter brings silent-movie gravity to the role, letting every glance about the cabin hint at a history of half-swallowed regret. When the story pairs these two—pilot and prisoner, both equal parts liability and lifeline—it becomes a brawny little symphony of brotherhood, haunted pasts, and mutual necessity. Their partnership lifts “Plane” out of the tailspin of predictability: there’s real chemistry here, not just the elbow-jabbing stuff of mismatched-buddy schtick, but moments of shared understanding that punch through the genre’s cloud cover.
Of course, every flight has its crying babies and fidgeting executives, but Richet—or perhaps just a blessedly tight screenplay—mostly keeps us focused on suspense rather than the shrill wreckage of irritating supporting players. A few passengers squawk in the face of peril, acting as ironic ballast; their pettiness under fire is both amusing and, briefly, exasperating, but the movie’s nerves return quickly to higher stakes. Whenever the pacing threatens to drop, the film reloads its tension with fresh peril, clever reversals, and the gnawing ache that redemption is always one bad choice out of reach.
What impresses most is Richet’s grip on tone. “Plane” is never camp or self-sabotaging; it wears its disaster with a workingman’s dignity. The action is precisely staged—no winking, postmodern pyrotechnics needed—with camera sweeps that keep you aware of every constricting inch in the cabin, and then, with the crash, the jungle opens up into a wilderness of guerrillas and gunfire, spinning the old element of “man versus the elements” into a fiery “man versus man, and the messes of his own making” spectacle. Brendan Galvin’s cinematography captures both the boxy claustrophobia of an airliner in chaos and the sweaty, green menace of the jungle with equal punch.
There’s a refreshing directness to the sound design too: engines howl, bullets chatter, and—the true terror—the click of seatbelts in silence. The costumes even have work to do: Butler’s battered jacket is less airline chic than a well-worn suit of armor, while the jungle militia look borrowed from rejected comic-book villains—scruffy, but with just enough snake oil to convince.
Is it all perfect? Of course not. Occasionally the film lurches toward melodrama—there’s a subplot about Torrance’s daughter that hovers along the edge of syrupy, threatening a bit of turbulence in the tone. Some beats are telegraphed from cruising altitude—a predictable passenger freakout here, a bit of forced exposition there. But these are the kind of flaws that come with the genre’s ticket, and Richet’s direction skids around them with such propulsion you barely notice.
The miracle of “Plane” is not that it reinvents the cockpit-bound suspense picture. It’s that it does the old thing exquisitely well, making the familiar urgent again. It finds a metaphor for collective survival not just in the screaming engines and skidding tires, but in the haggard hope that people—and movies—might still surprise you. Like any good action picture, “Plane” is less about gravity than about defiance, about gambling on just one more decent landing in a world gone rotten with storms.
If you measure the worth of a film by how thoroughly it grabs you and shakes the boredom loose, then “Plane” is a touch of adrenaline at 30,000 feet. You might white-knuckle the armrest at the absurdities, or grit your teeth at the odd sentimental stumble, but you’ll land—finally—someplace you didn’t expect: genuinely moved, just a little more alive. Buckle up, don’t expect high courtesy from fate, and let this one remind you that movies, much like flights through foul weather, sometimes earn their wings where the turbulence is worst.
