PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 12/20/04)

Sometimes in the midst of the bustle of the holiday season and theaters packed with period dramas and Oscar buzzworthies, a cookie-cutter action movie ain't so bad. Consider Flight of the Phoenix, a remake of the 1965 film with Dennis Quaid in the Jimmy Stewart role, which Fox decided to roll out at this odd time of year for no apparent reason.

Against a sometimes picturesque sand-blown landscape, Quaid is the pilot of a rusted-out corporate cargo plane that's just picked up a motley crew of oil-rig workers in the middle of the Mongolian desert. If you know anything about the original, you know the plane crashes hundreds of miles from anywhere, and the survivors, each one a two-dimensional type (as is de riguer in these kinds of movies), battle sandstorms, bandits, thirst, and each other. The types read like an off-color joke: a Latino cook (Jacob Vargas), handy Irishman (Tony Curran), ballsy bosswoman (Miranda Otto), nerdy jerk (Giovanni Ribisi), and wisecracking sidekick/co-pilot (Tyrese Gibson) walk into a bar... However, the plot draws attention away from the cardboard dialogue and personalities of these characters pretty well.

Best of all, the film manages to be self-aware. After some wince-worthy foreshadowing (oh no, they're leaving from Oil Rig Number 13! Oh no, devil-may-care pilot Quaid lights up right in front of a large No Smoking sign!) and even a whistle-while-you-work type musical romp (to Outkast's way overplayed "Hey Ya" no less), we come to meek rig worker James Ledell (Scott Michael Campbell) giving the pilot a cheesy speech about how the survivor's hopes and dreams rest on trying to rebuild the plane. Thirty seconds later comes Quaid's wisecrack that Ladell's convinced him to go with their plan because he can't stand to hear that cheesy hopes and dreams speech again.

Ultimately, Flight of the Phoenix is like one of those silly movies where the good guys are in a submarine facing enemy fire, the engines are shot, and the mechanic just died. You know they'll make it out of there, but you can't help but stick around to see who gets killed off and how they make their escape.

—Jessica Letkemann