Snakes on a Plane -- 2006 -- R

For one of the most horrible titles I've run into in the world of movies, the film itself was a decent thriller flick with an original enough premise (or at least one that I've not seen before).

The gist of this one is that there's a guy who witness a dangerous mobster-type kill a prosecutor who is going to try him for his numberous crimes. The mobster sicks his guys on the witness who is rescued just in time by the FBI who wants him to testify in Los Angeles at the bad guy's trial. Trouble is the bad guy doesn't want the witness to make it from Honolulu, HI to LA on his red eye flight, so he gets some additional cargo on the plan in the form of lots and lots of deadly and poisonous snakes, whose crate is set to open once the plane is too far out to turn around and go back to Hawaii.

It's a premise that goes off without a hitch setting up over a hundred for an untimely (and possibly painful) demise at the teeth of these snakes, and further serves to make one not necessarily want to take that next flight out. The snakes wreak havoc all over the plane not only with the passengers, but the inner workings as well forcing several innovative ideas from the leads as to how to keep everyone safe and the plane flying until they can make landfall.

A lot of the film worked very well in that the characters were given lots of time to be setup without boring the audience with details. We were allowed to know a good deal of the passengers, and not just our FBI agent, the witness, and a fight attendant or two, and these passengers were given some fairly unique characteristics to make them some what memorable whether they live or not, and it's unpredicatably throughout which will live or die, hence the need for the widespread setup.

Additionally, the unpredictability is what really makes this whole thing work through the potentially most distastrous central part of the film where the snakes get loose and start slithering everywhere. Loads of shock value, grotesque deaths, people panicking, etc. You never know who's going to get hit when or where or if they'll survive. Since we're dealing with animals who are basically hyped up, they only have instincts without reason, and we and the characters here know this. So once one comes up, anything can happen, and therein lies one of the greatest strengths here.

The problems we run into are mostly a lack of attention on the part of the filmmakers. We hit a numebr of really strange continuity problems that were so blatantly obvious that it's a wonder they survived into the final cut. One such instance had to do with the oxygen masks. An attendant gives an irate passenger a speech about how these masks only work for about 10 minutes after they deploy when he complains that no air is coming out; the very next cut shows another attendant with one of these masks over an injured person's face. If they are not working, why have it over this person's face?

A second point was when everyone is in first class and they are getting baggage out of the overhead compartments. Here's the problem. One of the setups is that the FBI commandeers first class for the transport of their witness, therefore, no one except him and the two agents transporting him were sitting in first class. This allows for a lot of empty compartments, and yet, they found plenty of luggage. Where'd it come from?

A lot of the characters, while occasionally unique, also provided a slew of cliches. As soon as we hear about disabling smoke detectors being a problem, you can bet someone will do it and smoke some illegal weed. There's the business guy who is unreasonably pissed about being bumped from first class. I can understand him being upset and some of his earlier actions, but he maintained this attitude all the way through the chaos...seriously, it's gotta give sometime. There were several other cliched characters amongst all of our fairly decent ones that served to marr a really decent landscape of characters.

But in the end, it was a really good film that provided a different atmosphere for a little horror and jump scares, so if you don't mind a few disturbing images, and want to catch something that is more intelligent than its title, this one might be worth having a look at.