'Non-Stop': Liam Neeson's unbelievable airplane shenanigans
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
[Grade: C-] As a tortured action hero, air marshal Bill Marks has it all: a shattered family life, an alcohol problem, a checkered past that got him kicked off the NYPD — and, perhaps most telling in this tobacco-shunning cinematic age, a habit of smoking in airplane bathrooms.
City Paper grade: C-
As a tortured action hero, air marshal Bill Marks has it all: a shattered family life, an alcohol problem, a checkered past that got him kicked off the NYPD — and, perhaps most telling in this tobacco-shunning cinematic age, a habit of smoking in airplane bathrooms. Liam Neeson plays Marks with a perpetually wounded expression on top of his now-standard grim determination, revealing his essential nobility (which he nonetheless reiterates in a speech delivered to a rapt audience of passengers so captivated by his husky Irish baritone that they're momentarily distracted from their impending doom). Those qualities are, naturally, tested by a hostage crisis aboard an international flight that hinges on an inordinate amount of jaw-clenched text messaging. Neeson re-teams with director Jaume Collet-Serra, who was also responsible for his other not-Taken thriller, Unknown. Their latest plays insistently on post-9/11 paranoia while managing to have absolutely nothing to say about our new standards of security and surveillance. Instead, such concerns are employed in the villain's final, incomprehensible motivation, which comes after too many other implausibilities have been crammed into the film like so many overstuffed bags in an overhead compartment. Collet-Serra shows intermittent flashes of style — a fight sequence in the tight confines of the plane's bathroom is expertly staged and edited — but too often moves beyond suspension of disbelief to actions utterly unbelievable to anyone who's ever flown in a plane or interacted with other human beings.
