‘Non-Stop’ Is A One-Way Ticket To Stupidity

The following review originally ran on Starpulse.com in 2014.

While it’s on the ground, Jaume Collet-Serra’s thriller Non-Stop has the average intelligence of a Liam Neeson action flick. After takeoff however, the airplane hijacking film rapidly ascends into stupidity until it reaches cruising altitude, where it degenerates into a moronic movie riddled with plot holes, before hastily crashing and burning.

Collet-Serra introduces his lead character U.S. Air Marshall Bill Marks (Neeson), by establishing that he is an exhausted alcoholic with a sad daughter back story. Oddly two of these three aspects remain relevant to his character, yet one does not. While Marks reluctantly preps for a flight to London, Collet-Serra uses slow motion, close-ups of Neeson’s bloodshot eyes, and a soft focus to show how tired he is. Given the investment Collet-Serra makes in expressing our hero’s lack of rest, it’s bizarre that he abandons the idea for the rest of Non-Stop.

Prior to boarding the plane, the camera assumes Marks’s perspective as he cases “suspicious” individuals in the airport terminal. The only thing actually “wrong” about these seemingly untrustworthy folks though, is that they look ethnic. Initially the movie tries to disprove racial profiling, since later we see these same people act heroic. But after we discover who is terrorizing the flight, the film suddenly confirms racial profiling. Mixed messages like this are one of several confusing aspects about Non-Stop.

Not long after Marks gets in the air, his trip takes a terrifying turn when he receives text messages demanding a massive ransom. If he can’t deliver it, the texts threaten that a new passenger will die every 20 minutes. Marks tries to catch the culprit immediately; however he’s not fast enough to stop the first couple of passengers from meeting their maker. Can he rally to save the flight and nab the hijacker though?

Probably the biggest plot hole in Non-Stop is that despite his law enforcement and military background, Marks isn’t a smart investigator. He panics easily and lacks common sense. Marks also overlooks obvious clues to the hijacker’s identity which he would have noticed much faster if he was thorough and calm. And because Marks is such an ineffective foil, the hero/villain relationship lacks punch. Instead of a game of cat and mouse, their tete-a-tete is more like cat and a dumber animal, with the villain acting as the feline for most of the picture.

Another nonsensical element of Non-Stop is the hijacker’s plot to frame Marks, something both the passengers and Marks’s supervisor accept too easily. Non-Stop’s writers even try to convince you that he might be involved, something that comes off as far-fetched. One fascinating aspect of this subplot however, is the speed at which the media vilifies Marks by exposing every negative part of his life. It’s pretty close to real life, where we see people publicly crucified regardless of whether their guilt is actually confirmed.

The culmination of nonsense is at the end, when the movie’s writers finally decide to reveal the hijacker’s identity. By the time it happens, you sadly don’t get a chance to understand the villain’s motivation before bullets and one-liners start flying. All you get is a hurried speech you can barely comprehend.

Non-Stop could have been fun since Jaume Collet-Serra managed to rescue his previous Liam Neeson thriller Unknown from plot holes with breakneck action. But his directing can’t save this film from the kind of stupidity that makes the Wesley Snipes hijacking flick Passenger 57 smart by comparison. The plus side: now that Collet-Serra has done two confusing Neeson flicks, if he does another one, we can probably create a new subgenre: The Confused Neeson. That would be entertaining for film scholars. Don’t you think?

✭ ½