Friday, December 26, 2014

2014 in Shit: Non-Stop

I legitimately don't remember anything about Non-Stop. I kind of thought I might end up trying to write a review of Red Eye and then just find and replace the name, because that seemed kind of funny. I'm not going to do that though.

The reason it would be funny is that they're both airplane thriller movies. It's not actually that funny. Liam Neeson was in Non-Stop. It's the first of the post Taken, Neeson-as-action-hero things I've seen. He did pretty well.

The whole movie sort of revolves around Neeson being framed for hijacking a plane, and the big reveal at the end is that the real hijackers are ex-military dudes who are framing him explicitly to cause an increase in security measures. It's kind of a good pairing with Escape Plan from last year; there's kind of this weird thread of action films in the last few years whose whole premise is that the villains are right wing extremists. Safe was kind of that way too. Non-Stop was definitely no Escape Plan but there's worse things to be than another Safe basically, so.

I suppose there's a reading of these movies that goes something like: even though the ultimate reveal of all of them is that right wing extremists are the villains, they are structured as mysteries in that regard and so the bulk of their time is spent actively making choices that render that villainy unthinkable. Which is cool I guess and I am not necessarily against the idea of categorically reading movies against their twist endings. But also they're way more fun to watch as fuck yous to Academi and cops and the military, so fuck that.

Non-Stop was a pretty cool movie I guess.

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