File this under “dumb but fun.” “Non-Stop,” the new Liam Neeson action-thriller, is pretty much non-stop stupid. It’s so stupid that Neeson’s character, Bill Marks, is — get this — an air marshal who’s scared of flying. Marks is also a raging alcoholic and his co-marshal is discovered to be smuggling cocaine — if ever there was a film to make us put our utmost trust in air marshals, it ain’t this. I’d trust Air Marshall John from “Bridesmaids” over these two guys any day of the week.
Things get really bonkers when Marks boards a non-stop flight from New York to London, where he starts receiving mysterious texts on a secure network: the texts are from someone threatening to kill a passenger every 20 minutes unless $150 million is transferred to a specific bank account. The texter is true to his word: 20 minutes later, there’s a body in the lavatory. It’s up to Marks, along with the aid of a trusted passenger (a sadly wasted Julianne Moore) and Michelle Dockery’s flight attendant, to figure out who the mystery passenger is before more lives are lost.
As has been said on the film’s press tour, it sounds like the premise of a Hitchcock movie, but truth be told “Non-Stop” is more poppycock than Hitchcock — the villain’s master plan makes zero sense, relying on coincidence after coincidence, and the explosive climax is just plain preposterous. Still, director Jaume Collet-Serra keeps the engine running smoothly and even manages to ratchet up some suspense as Neeson interrogates passengers with varying levels of aggression, and begins to suspect, along with us, that it might all be in his head. It’s Neeson who really sells this, with his grizzled persona and no-nonsense attitude: “Taken” on a plane, it turns out, is much better than “Snakes on a Plane.”
Rating: 6/10
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