Flight is the perfect example of a movie that has everything going for it: The rare great actor who’s also a movie star (Denzel Washington). A director who’s been around forever (Robert Zemeckis). An ace supporting cast filled with talented character actors (John Goodman, Don Cheadle, Melissa Leo, Bruce Greenwood) and sexy women (Garcelle Beauvais, Kelly Reilly, and a fully nude Nadine Velazquez). Plenty of “sizzle” elements to keep us interested during the draggy parts (note the above sexy women, but also drug use, cover-ups, and alcoholism). And a pretty spectacular plane crash very early on. So why doesn’t this film really work?
What Works: I will say that Denzel is very good as the central character, an amazing pilot who also happens to be a drunk and a drug addict. He finds layers within this character that really don’t exist in the script. And that plane crash really is a wow-ser, but if a movie’s climax is in the first ten minutes but the entire movie is nearly two and a half hours long…well…
What Doesn’t Work: The main problem I had with this film is that it’s almost all about the inner conflict of a character (Washington) who’s trying to cover up the fact that he was drunk/on drugs during the flight where he saved the lives of everyone on board…And yet that had absolutely nothing to do with why the plane crashed. It’s said early on that Washington’s flying saved everyone and mechanical failure is why the plane crashed, so where’s the real conflict or suspense? It doesn’t exist. We spend two hours watching Washington get drunk, fuck up, and lie, and yet the whole time I’m thinking he should lie because if he doesn’t, he’ll be the fall guy for something that’s totally not his fault.
Pretty soon, it becomes apparent that Washington doesn’t care about himself or his future, and if he doesn’t, then why should we? Robert Zemeckis isn’t really the kind of director you want in charge of a film about the gray areas that exist in one man because he isn’t a gray-area kind of director. The entire movie becomes about how one man’s personal failings ruin his entire life and how he not only pays for those mistakes, but overpays for them. The self-hatred of an addict may be fascinating stuff for some, but I think the movie could have been bigger and more conflicted than it winds up being.
What I Would Have Done Differently: There’s a very prominent romance between Washington’s pilot and a white, red-headed prostitute that is nowhere in the trailers or TV ads. Now I know there are some that aren’t fully ready to see a black man/white woman couple in 2012 (I could tell some of the audience was getting uncomfortable) but the movie hiding this fact seems ironic considering the entire thing is about a lead character who can’t admit the full truth. It gives off an unintentional dose of hypocrisy.