Snakes on a Plane

Seen 18 August 2006 & 20 August 2006; AMC Fenway 13 & AMC Loews Boston Common

* * * * (out of 5)

Pay very careful attention to the first half hour of Snakes on a Plane. If you don’t, you won’t be able to remember what happened come the end of the first hour. The plot is completely transparent, with only one purpose – to get Sam Jackson and a whole bunch of poisonous snakes onto the same plane. And it works, just like the rest of this ridiculous, always hilarious gore-fest.

All the hype that’s been piled upon this film really doesn’t seem fair, because the film doesn’t seem to have ever had lofty aspirations. It’s not complex, it’s not inspired, it’s not trying to say anything particularly profound. This is the product of someone saying, “Wouldn’t it be scary/weird/awful/funny as hell if someone put a whole bunch of snakes on a plane, and the passengers had to try to deal with them?” And if this is the best scenario they could come up with the fit that mold, I’m certainly not going to hold it against them.

And New Line seems to have stumbled upon the most amusing – though apparently not most effective – marketing campaign possible: let Sam Jackson play in a film, and then unleash him onto the talk show circuit in all his giddiness. I swear, Sam on the Daily Show, with both him and Jon Stewart giggling every 15 seconds, is one of the most entertaining interviews I’ve ever seen.

Sam plays Nelville Flynn, an FBI agent investigating an LA mobster named Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson). In Hawaii, he’s finally found what he needs – an eyewitness to Kim’s murderous crimes – in the form of Sean Jones (Nathan Phillips), an X-sport enthusiast who stumbled upon the crime scene. Flynn, his partner and Jones commandeer the first class section of South Pacific Air flight 121, much to the anger of some of the other passengers on the flight. But it’s all soon equaled out when a series of events leads to hundreds of poisonous snakes, hidden in the cargo hold by Kim’s men, find their way into the cabin and cockpit of the plane. After the snakes off the pilot and the majority of the passengers right away, the remaining passengers and crew must find a way to stay alive and land the plane using only what’s available to them 35,000 feet in the air.

It’s just so silly you have to enjoy it. Again, the complexities are very limited. Beyond Flynn, who fits the “Samuel L. Jackson” type perfectly, all of the passengers are restricted to specific but necessary types. There’s the ditzy rich girl, the celebrity, the helpless kids, the unexpected hero(es), the complete asshat (foreign asshat, no less!), the sexually explicit snake fodder… they’re all here. And they all play their roles as well as they need to, making sure not to get in the way of the two draws of the film – ridiculous snake-induced deaths and Jackson chewing scenery.

Read the rest at HBS!