Denzel Washington

Don Cheadle

Kelly Reilly

John Goodman

Bruce Greenwood

Brian Geraghty

Tamara Tunie

Nadine Velazquez

Peter Gerety

Garcelle Beauvais

Melissa Leo

Carter Cabassa

Adam C. Edwards

Conor O'Neill

Charlie E. Schmidt

Will Sherrod

Boni Yanagisawa

Adam Tomei

Dane Davenport

John Crow

E. Roger Mitchell

Ravi Kapoor

Jill Jane Clements

Tommy Kane

James Badge Dale

Susie Spear Purcell

Philip Pavel

Piers Morgan

Jim Tilmon

Charles Z. Gardner

Tom Nowicki

Jason Benjamin

Ric Reitz

Timothy Adams

Darius Woods

Ron Caldwell

Dylan Kussman

Janet Metzger

Bethany Anne Lind

Sharon Blackwood

Pam Smith

Justin Martin

Shannon Walshe

Rhoda Griffis

Michael Beasley

Ted Hall

Laila Pruitt

Precious Bright

Steve Coulter

Ted Huckabee

Sarah Clark

Vinnie Hasson

Randy Thom

Dennis P. Wise

Paul Volle

Hal Williams

Kwesi Boakye

Jennifer Olympia Bentley

Robert Zemeckis

Laurie MacDonald

Walter F. Parkes

Jack Rapke

Steve Starkey

Don Burgess

Jeremiah O'Driscoll

David Lazan

Nelson Coates

James Edward Ferrell Jr.

Victoria Burrows

Alan Silvestri

Louise Frogley

Cherylanne Martin

Scot Boland

Dana J. Kuznetzkoff

Greg Gilman

Kevin Baillie

Heather Kelton

Ryan Chan

Robert Presley

Kevin J. Summers

Michael Lantieri

Teressa Hill

Katrina Chevalier

Larry M. Cherry

Tracey Moss

Nikoletta Skarlatos

Stephanie Barnes

Carl Fullerton

Patrice Coleman

Tracey L. Miller-Smith

Quintessence Patterson

Susan Ransom

Patrick Rofoli

Jon Carlos

Jeffrey Schlatter

Sarah Carter

John Berger

Danny Brown

Goro Koyama

Andy Malcolm

Dennis Leonard

Leff Lefferts

Dennis S. Sands

Jenn Emberly

Justin Oliphant

Alisa Simonds

Ryan Tudhope

Charles Croughwell

Hans Bjerno

Robert Zuckerman

Daniel George

Sundari Moneek Reid

Sally Wilkerson

Matt Blackshear

Des Carey

Michael Cioni

Peter Cioni

Katie Fellion

Monique Eissing

Peter Oso Snell

Dan Marrow

Gary Duncan

Luca Kouimelis

Eric Hooge

Alex L. Worman

John Gatins

Robert Q. Mathews

Ashley Rae Trisler

Alex Madison

John Casino

Jeannie Epper

Elizabeth Davidovich

Kim Foscato

Pierre Brouard

Marilyn McCoppen

Daniel Laurie

Stuart McCowan

J.P. Jones

Stephen Urata

Toby Guidry

Judith Sunga

Kevin Michael Murphy

Michael Burgess

Drama

Flight

Paramount Pictures

ImageMovers

Parkes+MacDonald Image Nation

United States of America

English

airplane

confession

investigation

pilot

emergency landing

flight

alcoholism

f word

hangover

airplane accident

airplane crash

syringe

denial

baseball stadium

perjury

national transportation safety board

flying upside down

narcissist

relapse

substance abuse

hard

cautionary

inspirational

dramatic

With Robert Zemekis at the helm, it has to be good, right?

Pretty much. Not the strongest performance by Cheadle, but otherwise the cast is great. John Goodman is a welcome surprise half-way through and really brings this home.

With a feel good ending, what more do you 1-3 star people want??

It's Denzel!!

The title Flight is a perfect illustration that brevity really is the soul of wit. Its six letters describe not only the protagonist's occupation (flying), but also what he spends most of the film doing (fleeing), and if we only added a seventh letter (-y), it would describe the character himself. The film itself could stand to be shorter, but overall it's no exception to the rule that no good movie is too long. 

In addition to illustrating the aforementioned Shakespearean principle, director Robert Zemeckis inverts a famous Simpsonian maxim; in this case, alcohol is first the solution and then the cause of all the problems. 

One can identify a compulsive smoker when he lights a cigarette with the butt of the previous one; Similarly, one can spot an alcoholic when he soothes his hangover with leftover beer from the day before — and that’s just the start of commercial pilot William 'Whip' Whitaker's (Denzel Washington) breakfast of champions.

Whip is still drinking in the cabin of Flight 227 bound for Atlanta, making himself a screwdriver, or several, before taking a nap. He wakes with a start when the plane begins to nosedive. Unable to regain control, Whip is forced to make a controlled crash landing in an open field, saving most of the "102 souls" on board. 

This includes a maneuver where Whip flies the plane upside down, and it's not just him but also Zemeckis who takes a huge risk and lives to reap the reward. The scene avoids becoming unintentionally funny because part of its purpose is precisely to provide some much-needed humor to ease the almost unbearable tension; at the same time, it manages to stretch the audience's suspension of disbelief without breaking it for two reasons: 1) it has real precedent, and 2) it's exactly the kind of thing someone flying under the influence would do.

There’s no doubt that Whip has the expertise to pull off this maneuver successfully; the question is whether he would have dared to execute it while sober. Moreover,, the cause of the accident is a mechanical failure completely unrelated to Whip's sorry physical state. 

But Flight is not, like Druk, an apology for alcoholism. In an inferior film the vehicle, be it a plane or a car, would crash as a direct result of the driver/pilot's drunkenness, and the driver/pilot would be the only or one of the few survivors, making him feel even guiltier. Flight instead debunks the myth of invincibility that every alcoholic invokes by leading us to believe, practically to the end, that Whip might very well be literally invincible.

"Maybe I'm a fool," Whip muses, "because if I'd just told one more lie, I might have walked away from the whole mess." But he knows as well as we do that after that “one more lie” there would be another lie, and another, and another, and that eventually his lies would have caught up with him, because ultimately there is no escaping the negative effects of addiction. 

Like the similar Clean and Sober, Flight loses momentum with a Romantic Subplot that a nearly two-and-a-half-hour film doesn't need; on the other hand, I really liked Washington’s and Zemeckis's attention to detail — for example, when in the middle of crash landing Whip has the presence of mind to make a flight attendant tell her son that she loves him so that the box black can record it (in case they don’t make it), or the way his facial language unequivocally expresses the world of difference, the passage from hell to paradise, that exists before that first line of cocaine — supplied by John Goodman in a pair of hilarious cameos, each one heralded by the presence of “Sympathy for the Devil” on the soundtrack — and after.

Flight Movie Official Trailer

Flight( 2012)

Some miracles are not what they seem.

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A review by tmdb15435519

Written by tmdb15435519 on Thu Apr 15 2021

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