An airborne thriller that mashes up the plot of United 93 and Agatha Christie's Death in the Clouds? Surely you can't be serious!
Liam Neeson is the grizzled ex-cop turned air marshal on an ordinary flight from New York to London, secretly packing a badge, a gun and a whole mess of personal demons that might yet be exorcised by an act of redemptive heroism. Out of the blue, in mid-flight, he gets a chilling anonymous message on his special air‑marshal instant-message device. Every 20 minutes, a passenger on his plane is going to be killed, unless $150m is paid into a certain numbered account. Liam's bloodshot eyes flicker tensely around the plane – which one of this cross-section of humanity is sending the messages? Could it be the timid little girl travelling on her own with what is apparently an innocent teddy bear? Is Liam going to have to bust a cap in the teddy bear's furry ass? Soon Liam will swing into action, bending a few of the pernickety procedural rules about harming suspects and a few passengers start wondering if he isn't actually the bad guy, and if they shouldn't all think about gathering behind the drinks cart ready to charge.
Julianne Moore plays Jen, the talkative passenger in the seat next to Liam, Michelle Dockery and Lupita Nyong'o are the demure-yet-gutsy flight attendants, and Linus Roache is the careworn captain who frankly does not need this.
It's all pretty entertaining stuff, but as ever with this kind of film the question is … what about the landing? In the audience when I saw this, we were all relaxed and sitting back during the flight, but finally tensed with our tray-tables stowed and our seatbelts buckled, ready for the explosively disappointing ending, and watching the altitude needle spin anticlockwise with the horribly inevitable letdown.
Well, never mind. Veteran action producer Joel Silver, director Jaume Collet-Serra and screenwriters John W Richardson and Chris Roach have put a pretty sizable thrill vehicle in the air that whooshes along with no delays, more or less justifying the coy wordplay in the title.
A few familiar traditions are in place: the bomb thoughtfully accessorised with the LCD countdown display, the testing of what looks like cocaine by sticking in the pinkie and dabbing it on the tongue (let's hope it isn't polonium) and the "alcoholic" who puts away half a bottle of whiskey at the beginning of the film and doesn't touch the stuff from then on. There's also a new film tradition – the member of the public who under extreme pressure can upload videos to YouTube from a smartphone with staggering speed (does the site need tags such as "crisis" and "terror"?) I couldn't help loving Liam's final outrageous speech to passengers, which has everything but Elgar's Nimrod playing on the PA. They didn't get it as stirringly as that at Agincourt.
Like Robert Schwentke's Flightplan and Wes Craven's Red Eye, this movie shows that the cramped conditions of a plane in mid-flight are the modern equivalent of the snowed-in country house or indeed Hitchcock's train carriage in The Lady Vanishes. No contact with the outside world – or at least hardly any – and no help coming. The advantage of the plane setting is moreover that a measure of tacitly agreed absurdity is there from the beginning, allowing the audience to relax, enjoy the silliness and overlook the smaller-scale narrative implausibilities. And our cheerful attitude is perhaps not because of ironic inurement but simple innocence: in our hearts, we still can't really imagine something bad happening on a plane even after all the US has been through.
A word about that. The airline is not American: it is a fictional British company, the cabin crew are Brits (Lupita Nyong'o has a bit of a Cock-er-ney accent), and the script makes a reasonably big deal about Liam's character being born in Belfast, with a UK passport. Is this to show a bit of respect to America's most fervent post‑9/11 ally? A little bit of the Blair‑Bush spirit? Or is it to signal that this sort of scary situation is basically foreign, and that a US airline couldn't have let it happen in the first place?
It's not clear. But there's a terrific fight scene in the toilet: some serious fisticuffs at very close quarters. They had a bit more room than I expected. Perhaps it was the disabled lavatory. At any rate, Liam and his co-puncher experienced the male violence equivalent of joining the mile-high club. Non-Stop was never going to get any awards silverware. It collects plenty of air miles for enjoyability, though.
