Starring: Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, Michelle Dockery
An alcoholic with a hatred of flying, Air Marshall Bill Marks (Neeson) is nonetheless called upon by his superiors to board a non-stop trans-Atlantic flight from New York to London. At first everything seems routine, until Marks receives messages from elsewhere in the plane, demanding money or a passenger will die every twenty minutes.
Airplanes are, for several reasons, ideal settings for the thriller genre. An enclosed space, miles above any kind of sanctuary and no means of escape as well as the potential for a fixed cast of characters for the same reasons. Film-makers have recognised that potential with the likes of Air Force One (1997) and Flightplan (2005), even Alien (1979) is sort of cut from the same cloth. Within this form of the thriller genre, lies Non-Stop and it's okay and serviceable fare, even if it doesn't really show you anything that surprising.
Liam Neeson is moving through the character type that he's been making his own these last few years. The aging action hero is somewhere around retirement from active duty. He's competent and capable and mutters things in his gruff Northern Irish accent (here, for a change he reason for the accent for a supposed American is at least briefly explained) whilst Julianne Moore is the likeable, slightly kooky, middle-aged woman.
Aside from the nuts and bolts, there's a lot of oddities that strain audience plausibility. Much of what takes place defies common sense, but rather than allowing a greater level of enjoyment, it instead leads to a lot of head-scratching frustration. However, the film is dealt with a competent enough hand with right mixture of drama and tension to help serve its purpose as an entertaining thriller. It just probably needed mor confidence in its intrinsic strengths and not resort to the ridiculous gimmicks that dot around the plot.
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