Flight of the Phoenix Movie Review:


Stranded and drinking the sweat for your soaking bandana. Feeling the heat rip apart your body as you struggle to breathe. Then you turn to watch a gust of sand rip across the entire world you know. Welcome to the Gobi Desert. Survival? Unlikely.

This is the world that a group of survivors encounter as they are flung into a fight to survive after their plane goes down in one of the most deadly deserts known to man.

The man who put them there is Captain Frank Towns (Dennis Quaid), a pilot who specializes in taking jobs no one else dares tackle. This time his mission was to evacuate a group of oil employees stranded in the Mongolian Desert after their company pulled the plug on their project.

Towns must face off against the scrutiny of his passengers including oil executive Ian (Hugh Laurie), the spunky Kelly (Miranda Otto) and the “nerd-from-hell” Elliot (Giovanni Ribisi), who has a vision of sculpting a new airplane from the wreckage after he says he is an airplane designer. Will the ragtag group of survivors bond together long enough to find out? How many will succumb to the horrendous desert elements?

Ok, this isn’t the 1965 classic of the same name that starred Jimmy Stewart, Ernest Borgnine and Richard Attenborough. The ’65 classic was also written by brilliant screenwriter Lukas Heller who also gave such classics as “The Dirty Dozen”, “What Happened to Baby Jane?” and “Too Late the Hero”.

This version of the classic is more in the vain of an adventure-survival film kind of like “Hidalgo” from earlier this year.

Dennis Quaid’s resilient yet sometimes sarcastic pilot reminded me a lot of a TV series I used to watch as a kid. The show was one of those “Indiana Jones” knock-offs that spawned in the early to mid 1980s. The show I am talking about was “Tales of the Gold Monkey” that starred Stephen Collins as Jake Cutter, a renegade pilot who ran a cargo plane out of a remote port in the South Pacific in 1938. The show was a lot of fun and Quaid’s performance made so many good memories of that series come sprawling back. Quaid is the perfect choice for this role and does a brilliant job as the film’s central character. His resurgence since “The Rookie” has been such an amazing ride for the actor.

The only actor who probably out shines Quaid in a lot of key scenes is Giovanni Ribisi, who is practically unrecognizable in his blonde crew cut. Ribisi eats up scenes like a lawnmower as his maybe “Nazi”, maybe “hyper-nerd” development of the character gives Quaid’s quintessential hero figure a run for his money.

The film itself pays homage to the original but never tries to assume the same mantle. The film is basically just a fun action-adventure film that is sure to delight a lot action genre fans. It is just plain cinematic fun.

So Says the Soothsayer



Dean Kish

This remake of the classic James Stewart adventure starts intriguingly then dissolves into silliness. Frankly, it's painful to watch such a strong cast struggle so desperately to hold the film together while it falls apart around them.

Pilot Frank Towns (Quaid) and his faithful sidekick AJ (Gibson) fly into deepest Mongolia to airlift the crew of a oil drilling station, including the humourless company boss (Laurie), the feisty project director (Otto) and a collection of brave and/or stubborn colleagues, as well as a nebbish stranger (Ribisi) who claims to be an aerodynamics expert. When they crash in the vast desert, the survivors realise their best hope is to rebuild a plane from the wreckage. Hopefully before nomadic smugglers find them.

It begins promisingly, with sharply drawn characters who clash against each other and the situation. Moments of understanding and compromise, as well as potentially fatal disagreement, pull us into the story. And the principal cast is very good (the others become either interchangeable or bull-headedly stuck on one personality trait). Quaid holds it together effortlessly, as if he actually believes the awful dialog he's asked to spout. Ribisi adds a wonderfully sinister subtext with his Young Hannibal routine. And Otto has the film's pluckiest, most involving role--and also its most thankless.

The first problem is production design. While the epic landscapes and debris-strewn crash site are fine, the characters are shot in over-lit close-up--it looks like it was filmed in a studio with a painted (or computer-added) backdrop. Moore's direction is a little too choreographed. The action scenes are fairly spectacular, but so flawlessly realised that we can't believe them. And then he adds a little Outkast karaoke-dance scene in the middle, as if he needs to break the tension and make us smile!

But even these things would have been acceptable if the film didn't subvert itself with a series of mind-numbingly stupid story elements--corny twists, ludicrous coincidences and, worst of all, extremely lame speeches ("We're not garbage, we're people!") that make us cringe in real horror. In the end it's watchable, but only just.

Rich Cline

After closing an exploratory oil drilling station in the Mongolian desert, pilot Frank Towns (Quaid) is flying the crew of the rig back to civilisation when they are confronted by a huge sandstorm. Consumed by the storm, the plane is forced to make an emergency landing but the crash leads to loss of the radio antenna and the lives of three of the crew. The survivors find themselves stranded in the middle of the desert, one hundred miles from safety and no hope of rescue. Thinking everything is lost, one of the survivors comes up with a plan to build a new plane out of the wreckage.

Hollywood’s lack of imagination continues as another remake flies onto the silver screen but can ‘Flight of the Phoenix’ update the 1965 original?

Trying to follow a movie that is considered a classic and starred Hollywood legends James Stewart and Richard Attenborough is always going to be a difficult task but this version of the film might not have the same star power but it is still quite entertaining. At its heart, ‘Flight of the Phoenix’ is a story about the enduring power of the human spirit and this is what drives both films, making it so watchable.

While you will know the names of many of the cast, there is no superstar here to hog the limelight and the film benefits from it. This is an ensemble cast with each character playing their part and nobody really have the lion share of the lines. The regeneration of Dennis Quaid’s career continues as he steps into the extremely large shoes of James Stewart to play pilot Frank Towns. This is a good role for Quaid as he shows his leadership qualities as well as doubt the character feels about been rescued. Giovanni Ribisi is always an actor worth watching and as Elliott, the man who comes up with the plane-rebuilding plan, he creates a character that is both secretive and obsessed. Tyrese continues to move into movies and away from his music with only fine performance. His character doesn’t really have a lot to do but he has a good screen presence that makes the role more noticeable. Miranda Otto leaves her ‘Lord of the Rings’ role behind her to make inroads into Hollywood with another good performance. As the lone female character, Kelly, you might have expected her to be the love interest for Quaid but she is a strong female character that has just as much to contribute to the situation as the men. There are also good performances from Hugh Laurie, Jacob Vargas and Tony Curran.

The crash sequence that sets the scene for the movie is spectacular. Performance and special effects combine to produce and exhilarating experience for the viewer. You feel like you are thrown into the sand storm along with the crew as the director and his team really raise the tension of the situation and the sheer peril of a plane crash.

You have to wonder why Hollywood can’t come up with any new ideas lately and why they feel that they have to remake films that are already considered extremely good but ‘Flight of the Phoenix’ is still a good watch. It is the ensemble cast that make the movie more watchable than it could have been. The story about the will to survive is an enduring one and will keep you captivated while you wait to see if the Phoenix will actually fly.

Jamie Kelwick

 

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