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Flightplan Our rating: Rate this movie   MPAA rating: PG-13 (for violence and some intense plot material) Genre: Thriller Theater release: September 23, 2005 by Touchstone Pictures Directed by: Robert Schwentke Runtime: 1 hour 38 minutes Cast: Jodie Foster (Kyle), Marlene Lawston (Julia), Peter Sarsgaard (Carson), Sean Bean (Captain Rich), Erika Christensen (Fiona), Kate Beahan (Stephanie), Greta Scacchi (Therapist) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Jodie Foster's been looking a little tense lately. She has often gravitated towards characters who experience stress or anxiety, and in this, her face may be her greatest asset: With her thin, pointed nose, her tightly pursed mouth, and the worry lines creasing her forehead, she communicates focus and purpose with an intensity that must be the envy of Tom Cruise. This persona serves her almost too well in Flightplan, a Hitchcockian thriller about a woman who insists that her daughter went missing during a trans-Atlantic flight, and learns that there is just one problem: There is no evidence her daughter ever got on the plane.

Jodie Foster as Kyle Pratt, whose little girl mysteriously disappears midflight

The woman's troubles don't begin there, though. Kyle (Foster) has a deeply anxious look on her face from the very first moment we see her, sitting in a German morgue where her recently deceased husband has been put in a casket that, in accordance with international law, has been secured for transport back to the United States. As she awaits her chance to see her husband's body, Kyle imagines that she is meeting him at a subway station, and she imagines that they are happy together. Is it a flashback? A hallucination? Later, at the airport, she worries that she has lost track of her daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston). After some anxious panicking, she finds her girl at one of the shops. But is this real, too?

These are the questions that linger when Kyle wakes from a nap about three hours into the flight and cannot find any trace of her daughter. Frantic, she searches in sections of the plane where she is not allowed—which attracts the attention of Carson (Peter Sarsgaard), an air marshall—and she pesters the crew into letting her meet the captain (Sean Bean, who has little to do here, though for once, he isn't playing the bad guy). Although none of the crew can remember seeing Julia, the captain reluctantly tells them to search the plane, even though it means inconveniencing the other 400-plus passengers he has on board.

Some of the flight attendants don't care for the interruption in their routines created by Kyle's panic. One of these is Stephanie (Kate Beahan), who insists that she did a head count and never once spotted Julia; though who knows, she might have done the count when the girl ducked to pick something off the floor. Others, like Fiona (Erika Christensen), try to empathize. Kyle asks if she has any children. "Do nieces count?" asks Fiona. "Almost," says Kyle. Tensions rise among the other passengers, too, especially when Kyle spots a couple of Arabs and loudly insists that they were spying on her room in Berlin the night before. It comes as no surprise when we learn that she is taking medication for her anxiety.

Kyle looks anywhere and everywhere for her daughter

The scenes of people searching inside the airplane have a certain appeal, especially if you have ever wondered what an airplane's innards look like. Director Robert Schwentke, a German making his first American feature, has a large, cavernous set at his disposal, and he makes the most of every opportunity to swoop up the stairs from one passenger level to another, and to take the viewer into the cargo holds and other corners that are normally kept hidden from regular passengers. At points, it's a little like watching those movies in which people crawl around in air ducts, except here they get to stand up more often.

Alas, Flightplan does not hold up well against similar movies. The ambitious camera moves, the claustrophobic sets, and the imperilled mother-daughter scenario all bring to mind Foster's last major English-language film, Panic Room, but Schwentke is not the gutsy stylist that David Fincher is. Red Eye, the year's other big airplane thriller, featured two smart actors who played off of each other very well; you could almost feel the sparks fly as their characters intercepted and improvised around each other's newest strategies. In Flightplan, on the other hand, the closest thing Foster has to a co-star is Sarsgaard, whose placid mask of a face is no match for her hyper-intensity.

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