Liam Neeson has had a pretty interesting career. He’s been acting for so long, and has done so much good work, that it’s pretty much impossible not to respect him. That said, he’s done a lot of crap too. The tone of the projects he takes are so wildly divergent that it’s hard to pin down what kind of a performer he is as well. How can you classify an actor who’s probably best known for a weird collection of movies like Darkman, Schindler’s List, Rob Roy, and The Phantom Menace? Ever since Taken made an impossible amount of money in 2008 though, Neeson has settled into filling a pretty comfortable niche as being Hollywood’s tough old man. He’s basically the new Clint Eastwood or something.
Non-Stop sees Neeson once again being directed by Jaume Collet-Serra (as he was in Unknown), and once again playing a grizzled, grumpy, wrinkled badass. This time around in the form of a burnt-out, alcoholic Air Marshal. His character has had a rough life and seems to be a little bit on edge these days, but it becomes clear that he’s still got some mettle left once he begins to receive threatening txt messages while on his most recent flight, and then passengers start dying. Actually, there’s a bit more of a gimmick to the plot than that. The setup is that the killer will make sure that another passenger dies every 20 minutes if authorities don’t transfer an absurdly large amount of money into his bank account of choice, and seeing as he’s sending Neeson’s character messages over the plane’s closed network, you know that he’s got to be someone who’s on board the plane at that very moment. So, in addition to it having a ticking clock survival element, Non-Stop is also something of a mystery story.
What’s kind of surprising about a movie that mostly wants to re-present Neeson as the gruff hero we’ve recently come to know him as is that Non-Stop makes him such an unlikable jerk from the start. He’s negligent with his responsibilities, he has no patience for other people, and generally he just seems to be the sort of person who rolls out of bed in the morning and decides to make things as hard for himself as he can. What’s not so surprising is that even though he’s playing such a joyless curmudgeon, Neeson is still able to get you to buy his character as this story’s hero from beginning to end. It seems like the gruffer and more haunted that guy gets the more adorable he becomes. That’s kind of an amazing superpower.
The main selling point of Non-Stop is that Neeson is playing a tough guy again, for sure, but there are also a few other good things about it that put it a step above his and Collet-Serra’s previous, blander collaboration. Mostly what works is the action. Despite the fact that the entire movie takes place on a plane, there are quite a few hand-to-hand fights, and they’re all a lot of fun to watch—especially one that sees Neeson battling it out with another guy in the bathroom. The fighting is brutal and well-choreographed, and always clear to the viewer even given the close quarters. Basically it’s all of the fighting scenes in Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, but with the camera being close in for an actual reason, and with skilled enough editing that you still know what’s going on.
Non-Stop isn’t exactly an action film though. It’s more of a thriller, and the main reason it ends up being watchable is that it’s able to develop a number of characters to the point where you at least care about them a little bit, and then it’s able to create a handful of situations that actually become tense once their lives are hanging in the balance. Mostly it’s the twenty minute countdown gimmick that accomplishes this feat. Once the clock starts ticking down and it becomes clear that Neeson still doesn’t have the situation under control, things get squirmy.
After a few go-arounds the gimmick does become something of a problem though. It doesn’t take long for it to become clear that Neeson’s actions are being anticipated and manipulated, and the longer he keeps trying and failing to use his lone-wolf, Air Marshal SOP to catch the bad guy, the more you want to shake him and demand that he just explain what’s going on to the passengers. Too much of the film’s drama is reliant on a frustrating lack of communication. The constant txting between him and the bad guy gets tiresome too. After the first couple messages came in, couldn’t Neeson have put his phone on vibrate? If the killer’s txts had been less frequent, and had only come when something truly terrible was going to happen, then Collet-Serra could have really turned the volume up on the txt tone and used it to terrorize the audience. Instead, the txting is constant, and it only takes a good ten minutes before you’re completely sick of hearing the sound go off. Combine that with the gimmick where the text of the conversations appears floating in the air next to Neeson’s head, and Non-Stop starts to feel like a movie from ten years ago that’s trying its best to look stylish and current.
The content of those conversations, and the conversations Neeson has with his small handful of allies (mostly a fellow passenger played by Julianne Moore and a friendly stewardess played by Michelle Dockery) becomes more than you want to follow too. The story is basically built around a series of tense set pieces, but the connective tissue that ties them together feels far more complex than it needed to be. Most of it involves Neeson running back and forth from one end of the plane to the other having hushed conversations with people, which makes the downtime of the movie end up feeling a little too down. Some unwelcome social commentary creeps in too. There’s a little satire surrounding the speculation-based 24-hour news churn that’s ruined journalism in the last twenty years or so that works pretty well, but by the time the villain of the film finally gets uncovered and begins to monologue about the motivations behind his actions, the whole thing gets to the point of being positively Scooby-Doo in its clunkiness.
Liam Neeson growling and throat-punching psychopaths on an airplane is all that anyone was asking out of Non-Stop, and when it keeps its focus firmly on that it ends up working pretty well. When it strays away from the mortal danger and the exploitative thrill of fist fights at 20,000 feet, the mood gets drug down a bit, which keeps this one from matching the pure, mindless popcorn joy of something like White House Down, which was a lot of fun to watch while not trying to accomplish much else last year. And, heck, dumb as it was, White House Down wound up being less offensive in its portrayal of a terrorist situation than this slightly headier survival romp was too. The way this movie singles out the one brown, bearded guy on the plane and ogles him with lingering, doom-filled camera shots in order to create moments of dread felt positively backward. Come on, movie, give your audience more credit than that.
