| BOOTY GO THUMP : David R Ellis's 'Snakes On a Plane' [7/10] |
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| Sunday, 20 August 2006 | |
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David R Ellis's Cellular was a guilty-pleasure B-movie treat (from a story by no less than Larry Cohen) which had the most fleeting of big-screen runs in 2004 before belatedly finding its audience on DVD. No such fate awaits his follow-up, Snakes on a Plane, which managed to establish what the media refers to as a "cult following" before it was even released. In terms of deafening internet hype, there's been nothing like it since The Blair Witch Project - so it's a relief to report that the picture itself, while clearly nobody's idea of a masterpiece, is a thoroughly entertaining multiplex crowdpleaser. It's ideal, undemanding, slightly ramshackle fare for an old-fashioned weekend night out at the pictures: rather like Cellular, in fact. And while Snakes is a bigger, brasher, more "high concept" affair, the script isn't quite as sharp, the overall effect not quite as satisfying. That said, even Larry Cohen would take his hat off at the sheer why-didn't-I-think-of-that economy of Snakes on a Plane's setup: perhaps even more so than Halloween, this is one of those rare movies whose title is its own pitch, its own synopsis. The snakes in question are a dizzyingly vast and varied array of tropical serpents, unleashed at 30-odd thousand feet as part of a scheme by which criminal uber-kingpin Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson) aims to bump off young surfer-dude Sean Jones (Nathan Phillips from Wolf Creek and Australian Rules) who saw him commit a grisly baseball-bat murder in Hawaii, and must travel to Los Angeles in order to testify. With the FBI - in the reassuringly badass form of Samuel L Jackson - placing Eddie under maximum protection, Kim must resort to extreme measures in order to eliminate his target: hence the deliriously implausible nature of his scheme. Believability is not, of course, very high on the agenda here, the team of scriptwriters (John Heffernan and Sebastian Gutierrez, working from a story by Heffernan and David Dallesandro) instead taking great delight at stringing together a series of (somewhat repetitive) attacks in which the pheromone-crazed reptiles plunge their fangs into various body-parts of hapless passengers: backside, face, eye, even sex organs and, in perhaps the most unpleasant moment, a tongue which quickly swells to windpipe-blocking proportions. On one level an affectionate, post-modern spoof of the cheesy-classic airplane-disaster movies of the seventies and eighties, Snakes also slots into the sub-genre of claustrophobic terror-at-altitude pictures that have played on air-travel fears in the wake of 9/11 - most notably Red Eye and Flightplan, both of which seem almost Loachian in their realism alongside the brazen absurdities served up in raucous rock-the-house fashion here - although it's notable that Snakes avoids any actual reference (either overt or subtextual) to 9/11 itself. The tone is, instead, thorough escapist: genially comic/horrific, and despite a fair number of yucky images the movie's chief aim is belly-laughs rather than stomach-churns. The size and skill of the large ensemble cast is a plus point, which is just as well considering how low consistency and depth of characterisation come on Ellis and the scriptwriters' list of priorities. Jackson isn't exactly breaking new ground here, but his trademark no-nonsense, tough-talking persona provides welcome ballast through the script's rockier patches - and Julianna Margulies is also a cut above what the material really deserves, making the most of potentially hackneyed role as the most beleaguered and competent of the air-crew. Flex Alexander, meanwhile, is consistently amusing as the swaggeringly insecure '3Gs' - referred to at one point as "the Howard Hughes of rap," and it's slightly disappointing that the end-credits unspool to the video for the picture's jokey theme song rather than 3G's big hit Booty Go Thump - a track whose title could well have served as Snakes on a Plane's aim-low mission-statement. Neil Young 20th August, 2006 SNAKES ON A PLANE : [7/10] : USA 2006 : David R ELLIS : 105 mins (BBFC timing) seen at Empire cinema, Sunderland (UK), 19th August 2006 - public show (ticket price £5.50) |
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