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Flight of the Phoenix Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some language, action and violence) Theater release: December 17, 2004 by 20th Century Fox Limited release: December 17, 2004 Directed by: John Moore Runtime: 1 hour 53 minutes Cast: Dennis Quaid (Frank Towns), Giovanni Ribisi (Elliott), Tyrese Gibson (A.J.), Miranda Otto (Kelly), Hugh Laurie (Ian) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Flight of the Phoenix is about a small plane that crashes in the middle of a desert, and the pilots and passengers who try to save themselves by building a new plane out of the wreckage of the old one. Because the film is a remake of the 1965 movie that starred Jimmy Stewart, Richard Attenborough and Ernest Borgnine, it is very, very tempting to say that the makers of the new film have done to the earlier film what their characters do to the original plane, and turned a sturdy old vehicle into a much creakier contraption. However, I must confess I've never seen the original film, so instead of making that particular analogy, let's try a slightly different metaphor: Flight of the Phoenix is one of those movies in which the plot mechanics are a lot rustier than the machine everybody's working on.

Dennis Quaid plays Frank Towns, Miranda Otto plays Kelly

First, the set-up. An exploratory drilling rig somewhere in Mongolia has failed to turn up any oil, so the company shuts it down without warning the crew and sends in a plane to pick them all up and take them back to civilization. The plane is piloted by Frank Towns (Dennis Quaid), an airman who has earned a reputation for being the bearer of bad tidings to oil rigs everywhere, and his cockiness doesn't exactly endear him to anyone either. No sooner has the plane taken off than a storm arrives, and rather than turn back or fly around it, Frank tries to fly over it—but the plane is too heavy, it gets caught in the turbulence, and then, before you know it, the plane is hurtling down towards the dunes below.

Miraculously, no one is too badly injured, except for the few expendable non-characters who are killed almost instantly by the experience. (One person goes flying out the back of the plane, which is par for the course in such sequences, but—in what some might consider a gratuitous gesture—this film goes the extra mile and follows the victim all the way down to the ground, just so we can see his body go "thud.") Most inexplicably of all, Frank's co-pilot A.J. (Tyrese Gibson) survives intact, despite being knocked to the floor before the plane goes into a tight spin and flips upside down several times. All the other passengers have seat belts, but how does this guy make it? Was something holding him in place?

Real men have chests like Sticky Fingaz (left) and light their cigarettes with acetylene torches

Once the plane has landed and a sandstorm has passed, the survivors take stock of their situation and realize that probably no one is going to find them before their supplies run out. Elliott—a mysterious passenger played by Giovanni Ribisi, who also designed all manner of flying vehicles as Dex in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow-surveys the wreckage and declares that there are enough working parts left to build an entirely new vehicle. After much bickering, the survivors agree to go ahead with Elliott's plan.

Directed by John Moore (Behind Enemy Lines) from a script by Scott Frank (Minority Report) and Edward Burns (The Brothers McMullen), Flight of the Phoenix is riddled with moments that seem like set-ups for later scenes, but never get any kind of satisfactory payoff. For example, who is Elliott? One of the pilots asks this when he first shows up, looking for a ride even though he's not an oil worker and he's not on the list of passengers. "It's a long story," says Kelly (Miranda Otto), the geologist. Sounds intriguing. But when, some time later, she finally offers a little more detail, it turns out there's no story there at all—Elliott simply showed up at the rig one day, waited for a ride that never came, and stuck around.

If you rebuild it, they will come

Later, a band of smugglers turns up on the other side of the dune from the crash, so Ian (Hugh Laurie), a company man who knows the local dialect, heads over there with a couple of guys to negotiate and see if they can borrow some water and perhaps some other supplies as well. Just as one of the smugglers reaches toward a box, something goes wrong and a shoot-out begins that leaves most of the smugglers dead. Now, in most films, we would get to see what was inside that box—we would discover either that the box was full of weapons, thus justifying our suspicions that the smugglers had it coming to them, or that the box was full of the supplies that our heroes were looking for, thus giving the shoot-out more tragic proportions. But no, in this film, we never do find out what was in that box.

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