Film review: Plane offers edge-of-the-seat white-knuckle ride

Gerard Butler does what Gerard Butler does best in a ripping yarn which turns out to be edge-of-the-seat stuff pretty much all the way through. There’s menace of all kinds, but Butler is our man for the moment as pilot Captain Brodie Torrance – the kind of name which feels like it’s been generated by a computer designed to throw out all-action hunky hero nomenclature.

Widowed Brodie thinks he’s heading home to spend New Year’s Day with his teenage daughter. They exchange loving words by phone as he dashes through the airport terminal to pick up his final flight of the year on the kind of dead-end route he’s been downgraded to after a little altercation in the cabin with a stroppy passenger a little while before.

But it’s not long before he’s heading for trouble, flying too low in too big a storm just so that he can meet the airline’s stupid deadlines. Of course, Brodie decides to fly higher (he’s not keen on being told what to do), but he can’t fly high enough to avoid disaster when lightning hits the plane. With virtually no controls left to him, he uses his years of experience to bring the plane down more or less intact in a remote jungle no one knows where.

And that’s when the problems really begin. It turns out they are in a lawless land run by gun-toting rebels who’d shoot you as soon as look at you. But Brodie being Brodie, Mr Endless Dedication To Duty, he realises his duty of care is only just beginning. Complicating things still further is the silent manacled recently-recaptured murderer Brodie had been reluctantly ferrying on his eventual route back to the States. Should Brodie take off those handcuffs now they have landed? The temptation is that snarling Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter) looks like he might be rather useful in the circumstances they are now facing. And so it proves. Brodie and Gaspare make an unlikely double act especially when the surviving passengers are kidnapped by the baddies.

The film isn’t high art, and nor was it ever intended to be, but where it really scores is in the sheer relentlessness of the perils which stack up. The good guys are forever leaping from one frying pan to the next as their options slowly close down on them. It’s probably not a film you are going to remember too long afterwards, but at the time you won’t be able to take your eyes off it. It’s brutal and it is gripping – and it is played with plenty of gusto, Butler perfect for the role and Colter similarly so.

It’s a ghastly storm followed by the perfect storm, everything conspiring against them as they pit their survival instincts against the worst that the rebels and the jungle conditions can throw at them. Help is on the way, but our heroes know it is going to be far too slow getting there. It's not a film for lovers of subtlety or nuance, but as an action thriller it is up there with the best.

Director Jean-François Richet paces it brilliantly. You’ll come out feeling you’ve been through it too. Not a film you can imagine being watched on too many flights, though!