Jodie Foster suffers splendidly on film and this aerial thriller would be nothing much without her.
It has so many doubtful pieces of logic that its ambition to be a Hitchcockian mystery on board a huge, state-of-the-art airliner is almost laughable. Yet you watch because at the centre of it is our Jodie.
She plays Kyle, a woman who has just lost her husband and is transporting his coffin and her young daughter across the Atlantic from Germany for the burial. We see them board the plane together and then the child mysteriously disappears.
But not before the two watch the coffin being placed on the plane and the little girl draws a heart on the misty window (no doubt a direct reference to Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes). But, alas, there is no Basil Radford or Naunton Wayne to entertain us during the journey.
Instead, a search is started by the crew and, remarkably, no one can actually remember the girl sitting in her seat, so it's called off. Attention turns, instead, to the mother who is beginning to arouse suspicion. Is she mad, or a bomber?
Increasingly desperate, Kyle takes matters into her own hands, managing to claw her way through the toilet ceiling into the plane's hold, where her husband lies in his coffin.
Still she can't find her daughter and air marshal Peter Sarsgaard detains her to prevent everyone else panicking. As the passengers applaud his efforts, you know there's something wrong somewhere.
German director Robert Schwentke has a fine old time watching the giant plane leave the ground like a huge bird of prey, and manoeuvres his cast, which includes Sean Bean as the captain, skilfully around inside it.
This is not a thriller to think too hard about but it's nicely claustrophobic and possessed of a star who works hard to convince us that something passably real is going on.
Flightplan
Cert: cert12A
