Aviation study – Newspaper Kommersant No. 16 (7461) dated 01/30/2023

The action movie “Crash” (Plane), made by an international film crew led by French director Jean-Francois Richet, was released. Movie reminded Julia Shagelman pirated video production of the late 1980s, but did not convince him that it was these memories that should be revived.

The original title of the picture sounds quite plain, not to say boring: just “Airplane”. And it really starts like the most typical disaster movie ever. Singapore airport, New Year’s Eve, passengers in a hurry, and among them, out of breath, in a hurry to catch his flight Captain Brody Torrance (Gerard Butler), who is supposed to fly the low-cost Trailblazer plane to Tokyo. The co-pilot on the flight is a native of Hong Kong Delhi (Yoson Anh), to whom Torrance quickly lays out his backstory: firstly, he is by no means an Englishman, but a proud Scot, and secondly, he used to work after all in British aviation, first transport, and then civil, and now it has come down to such low-budget flights. Later it turns out that he was fired for a fight with a rowdy passenger, but the thought involuntarily creeps in that being late for work in decent airlines is also not welcome. Torrance, as the founder of the airport genre Arthur Haley bequeathed, also has a personal drama: his wife has died, and his young daughter (Haley Hecking) lives far away, even in California, and after this New Year’s flight, Brody is going to visit her for the first time in a long time .

There are only fourteen passengers on the flight, which in the first place is probably due to the film’s almost as modest budget as Trailblazer’s. Nevertheless, the authors do not waste time getting to know them (and even more so inventing characters for them), except for one. This is Luis Gaspard (Mike Colter), convicted of murder and a fugitive in Bali, who is now, for some reason, being extradited on a low-cost airline to Toronto via Singapore and Tokyo, and is accompanied by a gloomy looking police officer (Otis Winston). Torrance does not like such a valuable cargo at all, but there is nowhere to go.

In the meantime, the air carrier saves as much as it can. When Torrance warns that there is a storm ahead of him and suggests that he go around it, the authorities do not agree, as this will lead to additional fuel costs, and orders to fly forward, they say, the storm will end by itself. Needless to say, it does not end at all, and here the Russian rental title of the film justifies itself. Lightning strikes the plane, it shakes and chatters in the air, the instruments fail, the passengers panic, the policeman protecting Gaspard dies solely due to his own stupidity, and with him one of the flight attendants. Nevertheless, Captain Torrance manages, having shown remarkable professionalism, to straighten the board and land it literally on a swear word and on one wing in some kind of jungle. Alas, this is just the beginning of his problems, and the picture from the disaster movie turns into a not that hard action movie, which is easy to imagine on a worn videotape of the year 1987 that way.

It turns out that the plane landed on one of the Philippine islands, captured by some “rebels”, where the authorities and laws of any country are absolutely powerless. Meanwhile, the rebels make their living by taking hostages of foreigners, for whom they demand a ransom, and in case of non-payment they kill them. Where they take these foreigners in their hole for the remaining 364 days of the year is absolutely incomprehensible, but in the literal sense the plane that fell from the sky turns out to be the best New Year’s gift for them. While Torrance and Gaspar, who convinced the captain to remove his handcuffs, go to look for a connection, the rebels, led by their leader Junmar (Evan Dane Taylor, standing out from the rest of the indistinguishable men in camouflage with lush hair) capture passengers and take them to their base. The responsible captain, of course, decides to save them, followed by a series of action-packed episodes of the format “two team-mate heroes in sweaty T-shirts bravely confront an entire army of thugs of exotic origin.” At the decisive moment, however, armed mercenaries come to the aid of Torrance, who were sent to the island by the airline that decided to rescue its own flight, for which it had to involve a specialist who can solve problems with surprising ease bypassing the criminal code (Tony Goldwyn).

The plane at this time stands in the bushes, like the notorious piano, in order to effectively rise into the air again in the last ten minutes and remind that it is the main character in this film. Perhaps, the film itself ultimately resembles a flight on an unimportant low-cost airline: it will, of course, take you from point A to point B, but this journey will not be pleasant, and you will hardly want to repeat it.