Plane

Directed by Jean-François Richet

Running time: 1hr47 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

Gerard Butler stars in Plane

In E. M. Forster’s seminal work of literary criticism, Aspects of the Novel, he spends a fair bit of time defining the difference between flat characters versus round characters. Flat characters are not necessarily a bad thing, he avers: 

“One great advantage of flat characters is that they are easily recognised whenever they come in. [...] It is a convenience for an author when he can strike with his full force at once, and flat characters are very useful to him, since they never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere – little luminous discs of pre-arranged size, pushed hither and thither like counters across the void or between the stars; most satisfactory.”

These types clearly have a place in fiction. One of those places is the action movie Plane, a dumb, fun film in which Gerard Butler plays the impeccably named Brodie Torrance. You know the drill: he’s a scruffy, manly, no-bullshit former RAF bloke, now a commercial pilot relegated to flying crappy routes for a cheapo airline after punching out an uppity passenger. He is a flat character, and when his plane gets in trouble due to the insistence of a mealy-mouthed pencil pusher (flat character) that he fly through a storm to save fuel costs, Brodie naturally manages to land said plane successfully, albeit in territory controlled by a Filipino warlord type (would you believe, a flat character). 

Brodie thereby earns the respect of the crew and passengers, including the plucky young co-pilot who just wants to get back home to where his adorable wife and kids are waiting for him, and the gruff convict with possibly useful fighting skills. The only character who is not impressed is the jerkass guy who we saw board the plane earlier being a complete tool on his mobile phone. Naturally, the rules of flat characters ensure that jerkass guy is a whiny bitch about the improbable feat of supreme skill that just saved his life.

Flat characters are the engine that propels this type of movie to liftoff. The work of a talented crew in a film like this will simply sit there on the runway without them. And the crew here is indeed talented: the film is edited by David Rosenbloom, an Oscar nominee for his work on Michael Mann’s The Insider, and shot by veteran DoP Brendan Galvin, who cut his teeth as junior crew on The Commitments and The Crying Game and has gone on to shoot more films than Brodie Torrance has shot warlords (Galvin’s work also includes the Westlife video, ‘Flying Without Wings’, in which the lads so memorably all do their very best aeroplane impressions, which may or may not have secured him this later gig).

My only(ish) criticism of Plane lies with the writing: the flat characters are not flattened to the full extent of their potential flatness. Take the jerkass guy, clearly patterned after characters like Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer) in RoboCop. Give him more to do. Not in the sense of giving him a redemptive character arc – ugh, who cares – but let him express his jerkass cred to its fullest form. Let him try to sell out his fellow hostages to the warlords or something. This script is populated entirely with flat characters whose only problem is that they could have been flatter. Plane is so much fun, it’s just a slight pity it ultimately lands perhaps one set of sharp script notes away from some of the endlessly rewatchable eighties action movies lurking in its DNA.

PLANE (2023) Written by Charles Cumming, J.P. Davis | Shot by Brendan Galvin | Edited by David Rosenbloom