Flight

Great plot and great performance from the cast,once again Denzel murdered a role perfectly his performance is top-tier. this is my top 10 movie from him. 9/10

A great central performance doesn't make a bad script any better. 'Flight' begins - after a somewhat overwrought sequence establishing that 'Whip' Whitaker (Denzel Washington) is an alcoholic coke head - with a literally fantastic plane crash sequence in which he saves the lives of all but six of the 102 on board by being a super-cool ace pilot, unlike his co-pilot whose hysterics are completely over the top. Scary, but the shots of a flaming 727 or whatever upside-down at 500 feet make you feel admiration for the FX team, rather than empathy for the passengers. If you want a seriously terrifying plane crash sequence look out 'Alive!'(1993), about the Chilean rugby team cannibalism episode. In 'Flight', you'll end up chewing your own arm off in boredom. But 'Flight' isn't about planes crashing, it's about an addict and his redemption. In which case, Zemeckis has got the cart before the horse - or in UK English, the whole thing a*** about face. After the way he handles the plane crash, anything else Whitaker does will be a complete anticlimax. And it is. The whole film is too long, John Goodman annoyingly retreads his 'Lebowski' role, and of course the female characters are about as deep as a Stoli and orange. Don't believe the hype; turkeys don't fly.

Excellent character study about a troubled individual. As an airline captain myself, it is very difficult to sympathize with someone who would put his passengers in constant danger by being a chronic substance abuser. But, it is a very high credit to Denzel Washington to make you care regardless. His fearless performance is why Washington is one of the world's greatest actors! I am so very happy to see him take on a challenging part like this, after doing so many roles he could do in his sleep. Robert Zemeckis turns in his least Zemeckis-like film ever, getting out of the way and allowing the script and the actors to do their parts. The film gets seriously sidetracked with the two appearances from John Goodman, but Goodman has spent his career just popping up and giving goofball performances, so no surprise there. All in all, very good work on all counts, plus the ending works. ******** 8 Out of 10 Stars

I really wanted to like this movie but something besides the crash went terribly wrong. Of course Denzel is great, acting wasn't the problem, for the most part. To put it bluntly, the main disaster here was the director pulling punches, playing it safe. Remarkably, the supposed center piece of the movie, the crash, was actually completely irrelevant to the plot. Think about the setup, the pilot was not responsible for the crash and he saved the plane, for the most part, with very few deaths. The movie took great pains to make it clear how extraordinary this was, "everyone crashed the plane in simulations" etc. Well, did the pilot's alcoholism help this or hurt this performance? Simple question but this apparently had nothing to do with the moral point of the movie, so somehow his miracle flying and his alcoholism were never considered as related. There could have been many different solutions. E.G. perhaps the pilot missed something obvious in his walk around, so he both "caused" the crash and saved the plane, would have preserved the main arc of the story, kept the crash at the center of the movie but legitimately brought in the alcoholism. And the ending simply sucked, in prison, now wiser and honest........sigh, boring, as was the reconciliation with his son, feel good American tripe ending, double sigh.