...it's not tense enough, realistic enough, or exciting enough to lift it much beyond the ordinary.
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A "Phoenix" is described in my Random House Unabridged Dictionary as "a mythical bird of great beauty fabled to live 500 or 600 years in the Arabian wilderness, to burn itself on a funeral pyre, and to rise from its ashes in the freshness of youth and live through another cycle of years; often an emblem of immortality or of reborn idealism or hope."
The title of the 2004 movie, "Flight of the Phoenix," would appear to refer to the airplane in the story that crash-lands in the desert and has to be rebuilt in order for its passengers and crew to escape. But it could also refer to this release being the second movie telling of the story, originally popularized in a novel by Trevor Dudley Smith (credited as Elleston Trevor). The first movie was made in 1965 and starred James Stewart, so this remake may signify a narrative that refuses to die and gets retold every few years.
Anyway, in order for any action-adventure movie to work, it has to take one of several courses: It has to plant its tongue firmly in its cheek and allow its readers to enjoy it as pure escapism. Think of the Indiana Jones or James Bond adventures. Or, alternatively, an action yarn can play it straight, in which case it has to be either very logical and realistic or very suspenseful and exciting. Think of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," "The Fugitive," "Die Hard," or "Speed." In the case of "Flight of the Phoenix," it takes the second option, attempting to present a realistically detailed account of a downed plane and the heroic endeavors of its survivors. Unfortunately, it's not tense enough, realistic enough, or exciting enough to lift it much beyond the ordinary.
Still, it's got its moments. The first asset is its opening song, Johnny Cash's "I've Been Everywhere." It doesn't really set the right mood for the seriousness of the picture, but I like the tune. On the commentary track the filmmakers tell us they were trying to convey the idea of the movie's transport-plane pilots being like long-haul truckers, so country-western music was called for. I disagree, but it's their movie. I liked Dennis Quaid as Frank Towns, the pilot of the plane carrying a crew of oil riggers back to civilization when their oil well fails to produce; Quaid is always dependable. Plus, I liked the sights and sounds of the plane's crash-landing in the middle of the Gobi Desert. If the rest of the movie had been as intense and thrilling as this opening storm-tossed sequence, it would have been a great flick.
What's more, I liked the camaraderie and interpersonal relationships that develop among the airplane's crew and the oil-rig workers. Most of it is stereotyped, to be sure, but that's par for the course in these kinds of movies. I liked Giovanni Ribisi as the mysterious loner who tells the rest of them he knows how they can rebuild the airplane. He claims to design planes for a living, so after some consideration they go along with his idea. Ribisi is appropriately weird in the part, the way a Peter Lorre might have handled it in the old days. He also reminded me of Keefer Sutherland's creepy scientist in "Dark City." You never quite know where Ribisi is going with the character; a role, incidentally, almost exactly opposite his happy-go-lucky sidekick character in "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow." He's a most versatile actor. And I like Hugh Laurie in almost anything. Here he plays a snooty oil-company executive whose cost analysis of the desert project closes it down. I've liked Laurie since his days as a comic actor on British TV in "A Bit of Fry and Laurie," "Black Adder," and "Jeeves and Wooster," so it's good to see him getting ever bigger and more serious roles in Hollywood. Finally, I liked some of the cinematography and direction in the movie. It's not easy keeping an audience's attention for ninety-odd minutes with a single, static setting like a desert, and to the extent that we are kept interested, credit director John Moore and directors of photography Brendan Galvin and Donal Caulfield.
Unfortunately, for every up there's a down, and in the case of "Flight of the Phoenix" there is not only the crash of the airplane to consider, there are the purely mundane aspects of the aftermath. Once you know the setup, you know the result. It's just a matter of waiting for all of it to play out, and beyond wondering about the Ribisi character and the banter among the others, there's not much else going on. The characters argue, they wander in the desert, they almost die. Their choices are to do nothing and hope to be rescued before their water runs out; try to trek it on foot without a decent map or compass to guide them; or rebuild the plane. Once they settle on this last approach, that's it then.
Of course, we have the requisite beautiful woman along for the ride. Miranda Otto plays Kelly Johnson, a female oil-rig operator. Towns and Johnson take an immediate dislike to one another, which can only mean one thing: We'll have to watch them warm up to one another as the story proceeds.
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[release]15310[/release]