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Richard James Havis

NON-STOP
	Starring: Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, Michelle Dockery
	Directed by: Jaume Collet-Serra
	Category: IIA
	Rating: 2/5
 
This action adventure starts by convincing viewers it has something clever up its sleeve, but ends up deceiving them.
A neat psychological set-up that references Alfred Hitchcock's suspenseful style rearranges itself midway to become a banal B-movie that finishes in a thoroughly ridiculous manner. Viewers who started off intrigued will feel ripped off by the end.
The story is set on a plane, but those with a fear of flying will have little cause for alarm until the last few scenes.
The cabin setting is used to build a sense of claustrophobia rather than as impetus for the action. It's only in the finale that the standard tropes of a disaster movie set in. Even then the action scenes are underplayed, as the film was made with a general release in mind.
It all starts off well enough. Irish actor Liam Neeson plays US Air Marshal Bill Marks, the security agent charged with protecting a British flight headed from New York to London.
A dishevelled character who hates take-offs, Marks is calmed down by cool-headed passenger Jen Sommers (Julianne Moore), with whom he instantly bonds. But things go wrong straight away when Marks gets a message on his secure mobile phone that someone on the plane will die unless US$150 million ransom money is wired to a bank account.
Non-Stop gets interesting when the bank account turns out to belong to Marks, and he starts to act like a hijacker himself. Although the plot is not watertight, director Jaume Collet-Serra does a good job of convincing us that Marks may be having a mental breakdown and could be the villain.
For much of the film, Neeson appears paranoid and strange and looks like he's studied Laurence Harvey in John Frankenheimer's 1962 paranoid classic  The Manchurian Candidate and Cary Grant in Hitchcock's equally paranoid, and equally classic,  North by Northwest. Moore, and  Downton Abbey's Michelle Dockery, who plays a worried air hostess on the flight, provide the requisite amount of trust and suspicion to back up Neeson's performance of a man who's on the edge, and quite possibly over it.
One of Hollywood's most reliable performers, Neeson gives his all until the last frame, but even he can't overcome the predictable machinations of the endgame.
As the plot hots up, holes start to form. Soon, things soon descend into the usual Hollywood nonsense of male bonding, implausible solutions, saving children from horrible deaths and becoming better people.
Also, why are the passengers so docile? How come people die, and no one cares, or even notices? Why are the safety procedures on the plane so weird? By the end, Non-Stop has moved out of out Hitchcock territory to become a lame remake of Airplane!
The final revelations are so odd that it might be better to walk out of the cinema after an hour and make up your own ending; it couldn't be more unsatisfying than the one that's up there on the screen.
48hours@scmp.com
 
Non-Stop  opens on March 13
 


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Liam Neeson plays a paranoid US Air Marshal alongside passenger Julianne Moore and air hostess Lupita Nyong'o.

Lupita Nyong'o.

Julianne Moore.

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48 Hours

Film review: Non-Stop is a thriller that never takes off

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Richard James Havi

Richard James Havi