“What F&#k is a shark doing on a plane?”
You remember Samuel Jackson back a few years was fighting off Snakes On A Plane, yeah? Well, now we’ve got sharks on a plane. So how in the heck did they do that? Well, it requires going back to the 1970’s when Irwin Allen was the master of the disaster film, and he had a legion of followers. Writer Andy Mason and Director Claudio Fah found themselves a TARDIS and took their behinds to those golden days of movie mayhem. If you are willing to totally throw logic out the window and just hang with these guys for about 90 minutes, you’ll have a bit of fun, and likely you’ll forget it by the next day. I happened to catch the film yesterday, and … let me see … Someone was doing something, and there were sharks on an aircraft of some kind. Let me go and watch it again. Hold on …
Here we go. Back in the 1970’s there was a franchise of disaster films called Airport. They tended to be called Airport and the year like “77”. If you are familiar with that formula, you’ll recognize the first act of No Way Up. We’re at the airport, and we meet a few folks who are soon about to be thrown into our approaching disaster. You see, that was how it was done. We catch some cute moments like a little girl named Rosa (Nettle) with her grandfather, Hank (Jordan) and her very British Nanna, Mardy (Logan) They share some typically sweet moments, and that’s how you know the girl’s going to be fin,e but Grandpop and Nanna? They’re going to be fish food. That’s how they tell you these things. So when they buy the farm, they get that little “ahh” moment out of the audience — those mean old filmmakers. We meet Ava (McIntosh); she’s the daughter of the governor, who so happens to be running for re-election. That’s too bad for Ava and her guy Jed (Amoore), who are planning to take a nice romantic tropical getaway. Dad is sending a bodyguard named Brandon, and he’s played by Star Trek alum Colm Meaney. But don’t worry, kids. Brandon isn’t really going to be a problem. We also meet their requisite cutup-and-likely-stoner friend, Kyle (Attenborough), who is likely also along to help feed the fish. We meet these people in the airport, because when stuff goes upside down, you know who the key original survivors are going to be. And that’s exactly what happens. The airliner hits a flock of birds and engines start blowing up, and the plane takes a nosedive directly into the Pacific Ocean with no land in sight. Not that that’s going to matter, because as the plane is going down, debris and people are flying everywhere. When the plane does hit, it instantly sinks to the bottom of the ocean. The plane has holes in it big enough to drive a starship through, but our targeted folks get saved by an air pocket that keeps them safe … for the moment. We also discover a guy who wasn’t at the airport. We seem to have picked up a flight attendant named Danilo, played perfectly by a guy named Manuel Pacific. Now that’s typecasting.
So we have our survivors in this pocket of air, but it isn’t going to last forever, so we have to send some feelers out there looking for a way to escape. That’s when we discover it’s not the water or the lack of air that’s going to kill you, it’s the sharks. A few requisite chewings take us into the final act where we know someone is going to make it. There’s always someone. I won’t tell you here who makes it, but I think you won’t have much trouble picking them out.
Since 1975 everyone is trying to remake Jaws. With better and better image f/x you’d think someone could have beat out that clunky malfunctioning mechanical shark the cast and crew lovingly named Bruce. You’d be wrong, because you see Jaws was never about the realism of the shark. It was about the characters who were competing to see who gets to feed the fish that count. You’ll never get a cast of characters like Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider, and Richard Dreyfuss together again, and that’s that. The best anyone is ever going to do is to play off those shark-feeding times at Sea World or some other marine attraction. We all want to see the sharks eat. It’s fun. But if you want to make us fall in love like we did for Jaws … well … that just ain’t happening.
I’m not even sure if this film completely fills those Airport films or the spoofs that followed like Airplane. This one might just be in the middle. So find a seat. Hint: try the back of the plane, and have a few laughs while throwing popcorn around the room. That’s all you’re going to get here. And before you can say George Kennedy, you’ll forget the whole thing. Now what was I talking about again? “I thought this was an investigation, not an interrogation.”
