K-SCORE: 19
Director: Jaume Collet-Serra
Writers: John W. Richardson, Chris Roach, Ryan Engle
Starring: Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, Corey Stoll
“The entirety of the mystery is in determining how the villain is pulling off his omniscient mid-flight texting both with the knowledge he has and without getting caught, but it’s never explained because the writers are too stupid to actually have come up with an explanation.”
Spoiler Level: Total
Liam Neeson plays alcoholic air marshal Bill, who walks to his flight, has a weird encounter with a guy at the check-baggage point, and fails to identify the man, as I did, for a misguided radical terrorist. Then he receives a bunch of threatening text messages while on the plane (texting on a plane?) and proceeds to behave very poorly both in his duties as an air marshal and as a respectful passenger aboard a transatlantic flight. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists! Okay, here’s a hundred and fifty million dollars. We’ll shoot this plane down if you fly over civilian airspace. Okay, good call. That was a bluff.” Eventually, as always happens in such circumstances, someone blows a hole in the side of the plane and only the villains get sucked out into the upper atmosphere to freeze, asphyxiate, and plummet to their deaths. Everyone else gets saved by one unlikely hero backup pilot. (The pilot always dies.) Fun fact: in this film, the hero is named Kyle. Not Bill.
Hero tactics.
I think the embarrassing excuses for screenwriters were hoping people would brand this lost entry in Liam Neeson’s filmography as Taken on a Plane, but had I not written it at the top I wouldn’t have been able to tell you if this thing was called Flightplan or Red Eye or Eagle Eye or Airforce 57. Now that I’m looking at it, Non-Stop still looks wrong. I should be concerned this blog post will have fewer readers than normal on the grounds that even the people who have seen this bad film think they haven’t.
I, and I assume most people who’ve watched more than ten movies in their lifetime, came up with a much better twist than the one in the final product, whereby Julianne Moore’s superfluous character is actually the villain. I think that it was probably originally written in, but they gave Moore the script at the table read and she read the first eight lines of her dialogue and made a snarky comment like, “So, I guess I play a terrorist on this flight,” and then, embarrassed, the writers returned to their room and came up with an even dumber, more obvious, less interesting alternative. Which is sadly what you see here. Even if the script had the better ending, it would still be a terrible story. The entirety of the mystery is in determining how the villain is pulling off his omniscient mid-flight texting both with the knowledge he has and without getting caught, but it’s never explained because the writers are too stupid to actually have come up with an explanation.
Nothing was going to salvage this Non-stop stupidity, but my enjoyment was amplified a great deal at the very end when they pull off their miraculous landing. One of the flight attendants goes over to a loudspeaker and says, “All passengers and crew accounted for.” This is hilariously not true. Even if you can claim to account for the corpses that landed with the plane, it’s still not true.