Flightplan

**1/2 – Jodie Foster plays a delusional and heavily medicated aircraft engineer who –after the murder/suicide of the her husband and daughter - has a breakdown while on a large luxury plane flight and attempts to hijack it in order to ransom a bit of cash. At least, that’s what the real bad guys want the authorities to think in this 2005 action thriller. The acting is solid, the film looks pretty good and it is fairly entertaining, but two things kind of bothered me. The first is that the whole plot about a pair of criminals killing an aircraft engineer’s husband, making sure she has mental problems afterward, seeing to it that she is heavily medicated, arranging for her to fly on a particular plane at a particular time with her daughter, and building and setting up all manner of odd little devices throughout said plane seems like an awfully elaborate and time consuming way to earn a few bucks. I mean, with that sort of planning ability and expertise, the guy could surely find a job where he makes decent money. Why go through all that effort? The second thing that bothered me was the enormous, spacious luxury plane that was featured in the movie. It was gigantic and had all sorts of amenities that even some really good hotel rooms don’t have, while at the same time not having all that many passengers. I can’t see how it could possibly be cost effective enough to warrant any but the occasional novelty flight. Other than those problems, I guess the movie was alright.