Oscar Disappointment of the Week/DVD Review: 'Flight' (2012)

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If Flight's opening were a sign of how it meant to go on, it'd be a thrilling film. Denzel Washington's airline captain has to wrestle his plane out of a nose dive that, according to all the rules of physics, is impossible to get out of. It's a great sequence, but it's undercut by cutaways to Kelly Reilly's heroin addict, who's about to have her own very bad day. Every time we see Reilly it's like the film's admitting 'Yes, this plane stuff is quite interesting, but unfortunately that's not really the film you're going to be watching, it's this bland one over here with the strangely good looking addicts.' If Robert Zemeckis (directing live action for the first time in more than a decade) had managed to put us in Washington or Reilly's headspace for even the briefest of moments, giving us a chance to understand what their addiction means to them then the following 120-minutes might have had some worth. Instead we get a barrage of christian imagery and a lot of talk about God's plan; which apparently consisted of both felling the plane and saving the plane. (Shouldn't he have just picked one?) It's not even clear why there's all this talk of God, since at no point does Washington pay any of it much mind.

There's an interesting film hidden under Flight's framework: a question that's asked throughout is whether Washington's mental state had anything to do with the crash, but what's more interesting is whether the state he was in had anything to do with the second somewhat more important part: not crashing. No other pilot would have even considered doing what he did, but since it was God that helped Washington achieve the impossible there's apparently no point asking if there were any non-God based factors.                  

Despite spending all 139-minutes with Washington we never get an idea of what's going on under the bonnet. For comparison watch Smashed with Mary Elizabeth Winstead. It's not a perfect film but the normally pretty and pristine Winstead looks tired and harried (unlike Reilly and Washington) and her decline is completely believable; possibly because Smashed was written by someone who'd been through it and knew what they were talking about. Watching Flight you can't help but feel Zemeckis et al haven't a clue what they're talking about.

Overall: 4.5/10
     or
Opening: 8/10
The Middle-Bit: 2/10
Final Act: 5/10