Going to see a Robert Zemeckis movie in 2012 feels like a huge crapshoot. Sure, this is the guy who made Back to the Future, one of the greatest movies of all time, and Forrest Gump, another all-timer as far as audience affection goes... but when’s the last time he’s made something good? Castaway was his last high profile release, and that’s not only 12 years old, it was cheesy and boring when it came out. And recently, recently he’s been making those weird motion-capture animation movies that nobody on Earth has any interest in seeing. Now that he’s made Flight—now that he’s gone back to making a movie for adults that boasts a regular, live action presentation—how’s it going to be? Well, while Flight is something of a mixed bag, mostly it’s a solid film that’s clearly the work of a still viable filmmaker who, it turns out, hasn’t completely lost his marbles, no matter how crazy The Polar Express and Beowulf made him look.
Flight stars Denzel Washington as a highly skilled though highly substance dependent airline pilot who gets himself into something of a pickle. When a massive mechanical failure sends his plane into a tailspin, Washington’s character performs remarkably in a tense situation, getting as much control of the plane as possible, diverting it away from populous areas, and crash landing it relatively smoothly in a field. Only 6 of the 102 people on his flight died. Later, when other pilots are put in simulators that recreate the experience, there isn’t a single one of them who’s able to land the plane without killing everyone. Washington should be a hero, right? The only problem is, while all of this was going down, he was drunk as a skunk and high on cocaine, and the toxicology reports coming out of the accident are going to reveal his dirty secret. What’s the proper moral response here? Because he’s been flying while messed up, should this man be condemned as a criminal? Or, because his skills saved countless lives, should he be heralded as a hero? Flight asks a lot of interesting questions.
Despite these interesting moral quandaries, Flight wouldn’t have gotten very far if it wasn’t anchored by a great lead performance. Washington’s character appears in pretty much every scene, and his struggle with addiction is essentially the only story we get. Watching him pound liquor and stumble around his dad’s farm while he’s supposed to be sobering up for his big hearing could have gotten pretty boring if he wasn’t being portrayed by an actor with as big a presence as Washington’s. And, generally, Washington’s presence serves him well here. His charisma helps you stick with a pretty despicable character while he does a whole host of despicable things. In less likable hands, all of the gross wallowing would have been too much. Denzel’s star power isn’t the whole story though. Washington is doing some real acting and showing some interesting vulnerability in this film. Sometimes, when he’s in a less than great movie, Washington is the sort of actor who will tune out and coast on his established persona, but not here. Flight gives him plenty of opportunities to bring the pathos, and he takes them, giving this film an affecting and effective performance to build itself around.
And though anyone not named Denzel is playing second banana here, Zemeckis surrounds his star with a stable of strong supporting actors nonetheless. Solid veteran hands who you can set your watch to, Bruce Greenwood and Don Cheadle, play his union representative and lawyer, the always delightful John Goodman shows up in a small role as his charismatic drug dealer, Nadine Velazquez starts the film off right by offering up some jaw-dropping full-frontal nudity, and Kelly Reilly does her best in the role of a tacked on love interest who’s struggling with heroine addiction. Her character never amounts to much, but Reilly gets you on her side, and she proves that she should probably get a couple of the dozens of roles that Jessica Chastain keeps landing every year.
Aside from the universally strong performances, however, Flight offers up the good and the bad in pretty equal measure. The thing that Zemeckis does best here is probably his building of tension and the way he’s able to keep you on the edge of your seat through several of the film’s standout scenes. The first comes during the plane crash that sets this whole story into motion. It’s a harrowing experience getting through it, and not just because of crazy special effects or something. Zemeckis and his screenwriter, John Gatins, tease that the malfunction is coming, they throw you a curveball, they milk the suspense of when things are going to go bad for as long as they can without losing the audience, and then, finally... chaos. A scene late in the film where Washington has been locked in a hotel room so that he can’t drink is equally tense. Once he stumbles upon some booze he shouldn’t have access to, the wait to see if he takes a drink begins, and it’s painful to watch. The audience is made to feel extreme anxiety over the question of whether or not this man will be able to get through one night without drinking, and while that doesn’t seem like it should be all that affecting a situation, it is. If you want to study how to manipulate an audience, Zemeckis has created a couple scenes in this movie that could serve as perfect templates.
But, as good as those scenes are, there are also a couple places where the director’s touch gets heavy-handed. The soundtrack is one place. While we’re being introduced to Reilly’s junkie character, Zemeckis’ soundtrack runs through pretty much every heroin song you can name. When Washington is behaving badly we’re thrown so many Rolling Stones hits that it feels like we’ve stumbled upon Martin Scorcese’s iTunes library. This movie pounds your ears with popular songs so heavily, it feels like Cameron Crowe snorted Adderall and took it upon himself to DJ a barbecue. Also, there’s a sequence involving Washington’s righteous and non-cooperative co-pilot and his cartoonishly religious wife that rang completely false. And the scene where Reilly’s character decides to leave him... it starts with storm clouds rolling in and it ends with his realization that she’s gone during a simultaneous clap of thunder. Is it possible to get any cornier than that?
Missteps aside, the good stuff in this movie is definitely better than the bad stuff is bad, so when I was thinking about what kind of rating I would give it, initially I was leaning toward a strong four stars. Ultimately though, I have to go for a more middle of the road three, and that’s because the film gets to be a little bit too long. At 138 minutes, Zemeckis is asking too much of his audience; especially considering the challenging nature of some of this material and the fact that a couple of scenes that could have been cut down quite a bit or excised completely immediately spring to mind. Flight’s got some good stuff in it, but it’s telling a story that has enough meat to keep you engaged for about two hours, not two hours and quite a bit of change. Regardless, it’s certainly nice to see Robert Zemeckis making real movies again. For the first time in a long time, I’m eager to hear about what he’s going to do next.
