PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 9/23/05)

Flightplan takes every parent's worst nightmare – that your child might be snatched right out from under your nose – and compounds it by having the disappearance take place on a double-decker jumbo jet where none of the possible witnesses believe that the missing girl was ever on board. Consider how you might react under such circumstances. Now imagine how tight-lipped, steely-eyed Jodie Foster might play it.

We're certainly a long way from Home Alone here, where a family can make it all the way to Paris without noticing one son is missing (Flightplan is more like an alien-free riff on The Forgotten, or Bunny Lake Is Missing in midair). Fresh off Panic Room, Foster's the perfect choice to play this hyper-protective mother. A hair trigger away from doing something really crazy to retrieve her child, her situation is heightened not only by her emotional state (she's flying the body of her dead husband back to the States), but also by the fact that she actually designed the jet that swallowed up her little girl.

The problem with Flightplan is that we aren't all parents, so there's only so much missing-daughter stuff the average audience can stand before wondering when the movie's real story is going to kick in. Meanwhile, each and every one of us has one fear in common, and that's flying. Unfortunately, the movie is so firmly engaged with the mother's situation that we hardly have time to identify with the other passengers, who must be growing increasingly agitated while Foster scampers up and down the aisles, rewiring the plane to kill the lights and make emergency facemasks drop from the ceiling.

The setup certainly provides a fascinating liftoff spot for a Hitchcockian thriller (can you spot the overt homage to The Lady Vanishes?), and director Robert Schwentke orchestrates the tension artfully enough, but Flightplan stalls for nearly an hour in the middle while Foster goes crazy. Whether the crew is covering something up or Jodie Foster is staging this whole charade to draw attention away from her true motives, sooner or later, things are bound to get interesting. So why the delay?

It's as if an hour-long TV scenario has been stretched to feature length, building our expectations for the climax (one of those conspiracies so elaborate that you wonder why those involved didn't just do things the easy way) well beyond anything the movie could possibly deliver. I'd like to say that Flightplan is one of those white-knuckle, edge-of-your-seat thrill rides that critics are always raving about, but instead, it's more like a transatlantic flight with no clear destination, where the cabin noise makes it impossible to sleep and the in-flight movie is a rerun.—Peter Debruge