Carry-on (2024)

It's set in an airport at Christmas time and features a pre-male pattern baldness blue-uniformed everyman (Taron Egerton) who in the course of his usual work as an airport luggage checker suddenly finds himself the sole hope in a battle against terrorists, so Die Hard comparisons have to be made and this one, in comparison, is a stinker, really - perfectly watchable but absurd, with the convoluted terrorist plot undone from the outset and everything else that follows just a ludicrous, well, carry-on.

★★☆☆☆

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Sully (2016)

This workmanlike Clint Eastwood-directed movie tells the story of the 2009 emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River after the plane hit a flock of geese and even though it is all still fresh in our minds and we all know very well the miraculous outcome and the celebrity status achieved by the pilot, Chesley Sullenberger, it still proves as engrossing as any episode of Mayday/Air Crash Investigations, to see how the aviation investigation played out behind the media frenzy. 

★★★☆☆

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Airport (1970)

As if there were any doubt airports are the dullest places in the world to have to spend a few hours, here is the daggy 1970 drama Airport to drive - no, fly - home the idea, giving audiences an all-access pass to the very unscintillating world of Trans Global Airlines' operations out of a Chicago airport, with highlights including a "flight-attendant cam" scene that lets viewers experience first-hand what it is like to walk the aisle of a plane facing complaints from passengers about things like stale inflight snacks, and a bomb threat (a highlight, but mainly for bringing an end to the whole mindnumbing business).

★★☆☆☆

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Six Days, Seven Nights (1998)

After crashing on an island, a pilot and his passenger must overcome their differences (including a significant age gap) in order to survive snakes, dangerous base-jumps and murderous pirates, and in all the excitement, they fall in love, in Ivan Reitman's very minor but inoffensive romantic comedy adventure.

★★★☆☆

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Turbulence (1997)

This plane disaster movie throws into its Die Hard-esque Christmas context a gang of ruthless Con Air criminals, a Silence of the Lambs serial killer, a Perfect Storm storm, and laws of physics-defying Flight aerobatics, not to mention a Backdraft cabin fire, a "Here's Johnny" The Shining climax, oh and some turbulence, and despite all this cannot hide the fact it is basically an exceedingly silly mid-air "Someone has to fly this plane!" Flying High.

★★☆☆☆

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Flightplan (2005)

Jodie Foster plays a mother searching an inflight jumbo passenger plane for her missing daughter while the passengers and crew members around her believe she is delusional and doesn't actually have a daughter on the plane or anywhere, in this 'nobody believes her' thriller that takes Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes from a transEuropean train and puts it 35,000 feet in the air, but this turns out to be a much lesser film than that classic on account of it taking itself way too seriously, because the movie reveals its underwhelming hand too early, because the plot doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and lastly because early scenes suggest a stark, dreamlike unreality which makes all that follows hard to care about.

★☆☆☆☆

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Paper Planes (2014)

A school kid growing up with only one struggling parent takes up a sport, is good at it, enters a competition that takes him to Tokyo, and pulls out a bird-inspired move to win the title, but this is not Daniel LaRusso, karate and the Crane Kick in The Karate Kid, but Dylan, paper-plane throwing, and the "Whistling Kite", in a feelgood Australian kids movie.

★★★☆☆

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Airplane II: The Sequel (aka Flying High II) (1982)

Ted Striker, Elaine and Captain Clarence Oveur are again aboard a doomed flight, this time to the moon, in this lesser sequel to 'Airplane!' (Flying High) that has plenty of dopey laughs in its first half but like the Mayflower One, short circuits and comes crashing down in its second.

★☆☆☆☆

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Airplane! / Flying High (1980)

There are two types of people in the world: those that watch this cornball comedy classic with crossed-arms, po-faced, and others who snort and guffaw and howl with laughter at the disaster movie spoof full of daggy dad jokes, puns, sight gags, and Peter Graves' deadpan inappropriateness.

★★★★☆

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Random Hearts (1999)

Random Hearts tells the incredibly boring story of two complete strangers, played by Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas, whose worlds collide when their respective partners die in a plane crash together and it is revealed they'd been having an affair.

☆☆☆☆☆

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Red Eye (2009)

A hotel manager on a red eye flight sits beside a creep and finds herself the lynchpin of his pretty harebrained assassination plot, in this Wes Craven thriller that doesn't make much of the potential of its midflight setting - couldn't the creep just have staked out the hotel or intercepted the hotel manager in, say, a taxi instead?

★★☆☆☆

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Air Force One (1997)

Jack Ryan eventually became President in Tom Clancy's series of books, and Harrison Ford who played Jack Ryan in two movies went on to become President in this popcorn action adventure - but why not as Jack Ryan is something to ponder as you otherwise mindlessly watch terrorists hijack Air Force One only to have their diabolical plans undone by the most winning, wholesome, fist-fighting, plane-flying, terrorist-trouncing do-gooder US President since, well, Jack Ryan.

★★★☆☆

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Flight (2012)

A pilot pulls off a midair stunt in a distressed passenger jet, saving a large number of people who otherwise might have died and although he is immediately hailed an American hero, an investigation raises unexpected questions of culpability, in this wholly original psychological drama of surprising, er, substance.

★★★★☆

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Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)

The worst line in this, the most incessant and most implausible M:I movie yet, is, "Ethan Hunt is the epitomy of destiny," (thanks, Alec Baldwin, the new secretary of the IMF), a line as overwrought as the whole of this fifth outing that goes on and on, never letting up, with the most bombastic and ridiculous set-pieces ever, making me wonder if it is me that is too old for this, not Cruise. 

★★★☆☆

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Unbreakable (2000)

M Night Shyamalan has made some good movies and some stinkers, and this one with its hypnotic tone, Bruce Willis' gravitas as the sole survivor of a plane crash, and a clever slow shift of the story into an unexpected direction is terrific.

★★★★☆

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Non-Stop (2014)

Liam Neeson does his Taken tough guy act again in this ridiculous but fun Die Hard-esque action thriller set aboard an international flight which has found itself at the mercy of a mysterious...phone texter!

★★★☆☆

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Snakes on a Plane (2006)

The acronym of the film's title is SOAP, a fact my wandering brain found far more interesting than the entirety of this movie about badly drawn cartoon snakes on a plane full of idiots.

★☆☆☆☆

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