"Flight" - Film Review

There are those films that come straight out of the gate. They’re fully formed right from the very first scene. This doesn’t mean they’re necessarily good. But films that have identity crises, that can’t settle on what they want to be, are often too problematic to fully work and be enjoyable. Flight is an example of this latter type of film.

It’s all over the place. There’s entertaining things happening on occasion but for what purpose, it’s frequently tough to tell.

Denzel Washington was nominated for an Oscar for his work as in Flight, and though I don’t know if the nomination was justified, Washington is one of the better aspects of the film. Whip Whitaker is an airline pilot with major addictions, largely to alcohol. He shows up to work drunk and high on cocaine, and when the plane malfunctions, going into a nosedive, he flips the plane upside down to level it out in order to make an emergency landing in a field. The plane crash sequence is genuinely exciting and one of the film’s highlights, but afterwards the film becomes something far more brooding. 

It chooses to delve into the self-destructive tendencies inherent in Whip. Whip initially decides to go cold turkey after discovering the flight attendant he was having a fling with died in the flight (saving a child no less). He quickly returns to his old ways, however, when he learns that the toxicology report has him pegged for manslaughter for the six people who died on the flight. A fact that’s complicated by the fact that the real cause of the crash seems to lie in the plane’s mechanical failures and Whip appears to have pulled off a feat that no one else could have.

For awkwardly developed, slightly contrived reasons, Whip befriends Nicole (Kelly Reilly) a recovering heroin addict he first meets at the hospital. She tentatively tells him where she lives, and in a drunken haze, after failing to rekindle relations with his estranged son and ex-wife, he saves her from the deadbeat she owes drug money to. With his help, she kicks her drug habit (eventually joining AA – he goes along for one meeting, but quickly leaves, turned off by the whole idea), but has to watch as Whip continues to destroy himself slowly, guilt stricken by the crash and consuming increasingly excessive amounts of liquor. 

This has all happened within the first hour of a film that’s over two hours long. And it isn’t that it’s not entertaining or not well-acted or poorly directed, in fact, Flight is entertaining, well-acted, and well-directed by Robert Zemeckis (though it has some major pacing and structural problems). The individual moments and scenes work well in of themselves, but holistically it’s kind of a mess. The film early on is bouncing between Whip’s relationship with Nicole and his preparation for the trial. These two aspects are interesting but they’re often at odds with one another, having little to do with eachother and clashing tonally. 

At times, it’s cheesy or clichéd but Washington and a really great cast that also includes Don Cheadle as the lawyer Hugh Lang assigned to him for the case, who’s simultaneously disgusted and in awe of Whip, and John Goodman as his druggie best friend Harling Mays (who’s incredibly underdeveloped and who’s introduction is terribly handled). However, the ending undercuts much of the moral complexity the film had established and shoves a far, far too simplistic message down our throats.

Flight is an entertaining film, but the its initially interesting premise gets lost in the shuffle of a grab bag of ideas that work with varying degrees of success. 

Grade: B-