Plane Delivers

Blood. Brutality. Beheadings. What more could you ask for?

PLANE IS A MOVIE for your lizard brain—the part of you that craves basic sensations. The part that expresses itself in grunts. The part that wants to paw anxiously at a theater screen while muttering “Plane …” This is a good thing. The highest compliment I can pay the new Gerard Butler action film is that it lives up to the conceptual purity of its title.

Over the years, Butler has become proficient at playing exceptional Average Joes: rough-hewn, relatable Everymen thrust into circumstances that require dramatic feats of skill and bravery. This is a time-honored type in American movies. Back when everyone tried to be Bruce Willis, it was annoyingly ubiquitous, but our current Über-jacked cinematic landscape has less and less use for such raggedy heroes. This, of course, adds to our affection. These men have acquired a nostalgic glow, and Butler in particular has become a kind of people’s avatar for the way action movies used to be. When he’s on screen, you can taste the stale coffee and the flop sweat. He’s the demoted Secret Service agent (in the White House–invasion movie Olympus Has Fallen); the separated dad trying to make things right (in the comet-disaster epic Greenland); the newly promoted, not-ready-for prime-time submarine commander (in the maritime-action flick Hunter Killer). In-Plane, he’s Captain Brodie Torrance, a middle-aged single father and pilot stuck flying a Singapore-to-Tokyo route on New Year’s Eve for the low-rent airline Trailblazer. He lost his spot at the fancier airlines, we learn, after punching out an abusive passenger.