K-SCORE: 41
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Writer: John Gatins
Starring: Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle, John Goodman, Kelly Reilly
Spoiler Level: Moderate
Flight falls victim, like so many films, to the problem of being shoved into a standardized two hour block of time. They had about twenty minutes worth of story that could have been entertainingly pushed to thirty minutes. It’s when Denzel Washington’s character, Whip, is flying the plane that has catastrophic mechanical failure that Flight is acceptable. Sadly, that’s the first twenty minutes. The rest is a nearly two-hour slog through a non-innovative portrait of an alcoholic. You’re so bored by the end of it that you’re just praying for another plane to come crashing in through their hotel room sets and courtroom sets just to liven things up a bit. If only it had been a short, it could have done everything it wanted to do: shown a heroic pilot who is nevertheless an imperfect man. Yet the world of cinema still harbors some outdated ideologies regarding storytelling, so it felt compelled to spend a hundred and ten minutes ruining the first thirty.