Snakes on a Plane
When I first heard about Snakes on a Plane I got really excited. Come on, snakes on a plane. What else do you need? I was hoping for some sort of love child between Anaconda and Con Air, a movie where you can enjoy the ride and laugh (both with and at it) all the way through. Something that’s just so bad that it’s good. Unfortunately that’s not what we got.
Here’s the first mistake: far too much exposition. We already know what’s going to happen. Snakes. Plane. Got it. Let’s face it, a plot is pretty much superfluous. This movie should be about action, not about some contrived story where crime boss Eddie Kim tries to kill a witness in Samuel L. Jackson’s custody. It’s just unnecessary. The running time of this film shouldn’t be one second over ninety minutes. It should be as tight as it possibly can be, but instead it takes too long for us to get to the action or even see the first snake. If you are going to waste that much time, at least make Eddie Kim a really eccentric crime boss with a snake fetish, instead of just being a plot point.
Really, though, that’s another big complaint of this movie. Since these people are stuck on a plane and going to interesting locations is out of the question, the people themselves need to be interesting, unfortunately they are not. Look at a movie like Con Air, they knew they were limited by their own concept, so they made each character as ridiculous as possible. Here we just have a bunch of clichés: pretty rich girl, kids traveling alone for the first time, guy who’s afraid of flying, mother and baby, mean old business man, two members of the mile high club, and a stewardess who’s about to retire. There’s even a germ phobic rapper and a guy who’s a kick boxer, both for no apparent reason. Why do I even care if these people make it out alive?
The most disappointing thing about it all is just the general waste of talent. Samuel L. Jackson really needed to crank it up to eleven on this one. What the audience wanted to see was something akin to Jules in Pulp Fiction. Granted, he does kick it in to gear here and there, but those scenes feel like and probably were shot after the fact and thrown in just to sweeten the pot. David Koechner and Keenan Thompson are allowed to interject a little comedy here and there, but not as much as they should have.
In the end, I think the internet buzz may have actually hurt this film. It’s almost as though they decided to let the internet folks carry the weight and not really worry about making the film. They could have played into the midnight matinee kitsch but instead they just throw a bunch of snakes on a plane and hoped it was enough. There’s no real sense of rising tension, since after about the fourth snake bite you really just don’t care anymore. I guess I probably shouldn’t be surprised when all a got from Snakes on a Plane was just that, but by the end I was tired of those motherfuckin’ snakes on that motherfuckin’ plane.
The Grade
- Story: D-
- Acting: C
- Visuals: B
- Originality: B
- Enjoyability: C-
- Overall: C-
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