THIS IS YOUR CAPTAIN SPEAKING: FASTEN YOUR HAGGIS!
THE inane action thriller Plane (15A, 107 mins, is almost silly enough to be called Airplane! It stars Gerard Butler as commercial airline pilot Brodie Torrance, who says ‘haggis, neeps and tatties’ within the first few moments of the movie, just to confirm that he is, indeed, Scottish.
Brodie is everything an easily-pleased audience might want of an action hero: the only real question is whether he will deal with a devastating lightning strike on his aircraft, miraculously bringing it down safely on a jungle road on an island in the southern Philippines run by murderous separatists, before his muscles finally bulge out of his uniform.
Anyway, having saved all his passengers once, he must then do so again with the help of a similarly muscle-bound convict (Mike Colter) who was on the plane in handcuffs, on an extradition charge. Luckily, as well as being the world’s greatest pilot, Brodie is fantastic at lifeor-death close combat as well as being a gifted amateur telecoms engineer. Almost incidentally, he’s also the world’s greatest dad and, for added poignancy, a grieving widower.
I’ll let you guess whether he succeeds in his perilous mission, in a story that has all the authenticity of a conman’s smile, yet unfolds with a kind of crazed energy that might appeal to those looking for hollow popcorn entertainment. Shotgun Wedding (15, 100 mins.
which also features gun-toting Filipino guerrillas, is at least intentionally silly. Available on Amazon Prime Video, it is yet another romcom starring Jennifer Lopez as a middle-aged bride, but not even as good as the last one, last year’s Marry Me.
This time, J-Lo plays Darcy, whose dream island wedding to Tom (Josh Duhamel) is hijacked by the abovementioned guerrillas, who make hostages of all the guests. It’s terribly flimsy stuff, but it does feature Jennifer Coolidge as a character strikingly similar to the one she played in TV hit The White Lotus. As the bride’s flouncy new motherin-law, she gets all the best lines.