BEFORE: I had a very busy Saturday where we got our taxes done in the morning, and then I had a ticket for a beer tasting event in Jersey City, so I had to leave early because I'd never taken the PATH train before, after 40 years of living in NYC. I just don't go to New Jersey much, really everything I've needed has been on this side of the Hudson River - but there were many breweries scheduled to attend that I had never heard of before, and really, I've tried all the beers from companies that do the tastings in Manhattan and Brooklyn, so it was time to extend the reach. Everything's legal in New Jersey, including filling up those tasting glass and NOT stopping at the 2 oz. fill line. So I got a bit bogged down, even after stopping for a sausage sandwich, I only got to try 40 samples, which for me is pretty low. In my defense a crowd eventually showed up and there were long lines after the first hour, and then numerous bathroom breaks so I really couldn't get any momentum going, since I had to stop every 10 minutes and make a long walk to the men's room. Maybe I need to stay local and keep going to the festivals with the smaller pours, I'm older now and it just took too long for me to get home. Anyway, I filled up a few more pages in the beer journal and I got to explain to a whole new bunch of people why I have the beer journal, and I made it home safely, I somehow always do.
This was supposed to be a Jason Statham chain, sure, but since two of those films also have Josh Hartnett in them, I can squeeze this one in here before proceeding, because it doesn't currently link to anything else, so it would be stranded if I don't get to it tonight. Then it could spend YEARS on the list, as I've seen, so let me just take advantage of the linking and get this one crossed off the list, OK? Josh Hartnett carries over from "Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre".
THE PLOT: A mercenary takes on the job of tracking down a target on a plane but then must protect that target when they're surrounded by people trying to kill both of them.
AFTER: The two-word review should probably just be "Bullet Plane", because it's been about two years since Brad Pitt was in "Bullet Train", and that's about how long it takes to rip something off and change it JUST enough to technically be a different story, even though it's a very very similar story, just on a different form of transportation. It could just as easily be a nod back to "Con Air", or "Passenger 57", but I'm sticking with "Bullet Plane". We should have somebody make "Snakes on a Train" any day now, except that would be a terrible idea.
Also, this is maybe what happens when you don't properly fund the TSA, and suddenly you've got people bringing guns, knives and even a chainsaw on board somehow. Now the filmmakers probably never saw the government shutdown coming, and as far as I know the TSA has gone with the super-long scanning lines for now, but mark my words, if they don't figure out how to pay the real security agents, this scenario could be in our future. If there's a hijacking or another 9/11-type incident in the next few weeks we can totally trace it back to the perfect storm of not paying the TSA agents combined with a war in the Middle East. Yeah, that seems like a recipe for disaster, all right. The latest stopgap suggestion seems to be a plan to use ICE agents to scan people at the airport - but how would that work? They make you take off your shoes and belt, they put you through the x-ray and then you end up in detention in Central America, when you were just trying to go to Seattle?
I think we've also seen an uptick in films about mercenaries after the "Deadpool" movies took off, and the typical tough-guy assassin was replaced by a more colorful, outrageous, impossible-to-kill wisecracking sort of guy, somebody who might be trying to do "the right thing" but in the most extravagantly violently way possible. Does such a merc exist in real life? It's doubtful, but then how would any of us normies even know? Kids used to want to grow up to become doctors or firemen, but now things have shifted and at least some of them want to be rogue spies or mercenaries for hire, I'd wager, now that Hollywood has made them marketable.
Anyway, this film involves a former secret service agent who was disgraced (I guess we'll find out more in the prequel) but called back into service because he was nearby (Bangkok) and available. His handler-slash-former partner-slash-exgirlfriend offers him a chance to clear his name if he will track down a hacker called the Ghost, who is flying to San Francisco, and is believed to have suffered a bullet wound. Seems simple enough, board the plane and look for someone who's bleeding, that's probably them, what could possibly go wrong? Well, reductio ad absurdium, of course, and we know from the flash-forward that this is somehow going to end with a giant hole in the plane and a lot of other mayhem as well.
There may be one or two other cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperadoes, vipers, snipers, bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers and hornswogglers on that plane, hell it's a whole assassin's convention worth, and how exactly did they all get clearance? There's an air marshall, too, but he bites it pretty early and I'm betting Lucas wishes he could take that one back. And he does find the Ghost, and it's a bit like in the comic books when two heroes meet, after a brief fight they kind of realize they're on the team side and they would benefit from doing a team-up. So yeah, it's a bit by-the-numbers here, and we've seen most of this before in different other movies, just not exactly in this order.
And much like yesterday's film, there's a device which is a super-computer of sorts, the ultimate hacker's tool because it can get through any firewall or past any encrypted coding, this is like everyone's secret most unspoken fear right now, that some twenty-something's going to build the key to everything on a drive and then we all get spammed for the rest of our lives, the unsubscribe button simply won't work anymore. I know they meant to make things sound even worse than that, but none of these movies can specifically describe what these super-computers can do, they just all say, "Well, it's going to be really BAD" and leave it at that. HOW BAD?
The plane does not land in San Francisco as planned, because I guess the computer is flying the plane and we all live in the Matrix simulation now. Lucas and the Ghost end up in some other war-torn nation, and the work is just beginning. (I guess we'll find out more in the sequel...)
Directed by James Madigan (assistant director of "Insurgent" and "Allegiant")
Also starring Charithra Chandran (last seen in "Eternals"), Katee Sackhoff (last seen in "Tell"), Julian Kostov (last seen in "Ben-Hur"), Marko Zaror (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 4"), JuJu Chan Szeto (last seen in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny"), Danny Ashok, Hughie O'Donnell, Jyuddah Jaymes (last seen in "The Boys in the Boat"), Willem Van der Vegt, Sanjeev Kohli (last seen in "Filth"), Declan Baxter, Sarah Lam, Iren Bordan (last seen in "The Debt"), Attila Arpa (last seen in "Colette") Nora Trokan (last seen in "R.I.P.D. 2: Rise of the Damned"), Balint Adorjani (last seen in "Red Sparrow"), Katrina Anne Ward, Melissa Bale, Rebecka Johnston (last seen in "Midsommar"), William Mychael Lee, Brian Alanchis, Zalan Takacs, Bela Stubnya, Yu Debin, Anabelle Daisy Grundberg, Andras Seregi, Istvan Zambo, Heather Choo, Agota Dunai, Claudia Heinz, Peter Jankovics, Sanjay Prabhakar, Zsolt Szentirmai, Narantsogt Tsogtsaikhan.
RATING: 5 out of 10 neck pillows
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