I went to see Snakes on a Plane at the 10 o'clock show on Thursday night, and the mood in the theater was a cross between what you'd expect to find at a Star Wars sequel and a midnight show of Bedtime for Bonzo. He starts out all calm and friendly, taking much longer than you expect to work his way up to steam-out-the-ears funky high dudgeon, and since he's the only one on screen with a spine, the audience greets his every action-movie directive (''We've got to put a barrier between us and the snakes!'') as if it were a holy command to hoot and holler. Jackson, as the FBI agent who's escorting the witness, looks like Superman. Next to this sorry crew, it's hardly a surprise that Samuel L. The sexy flight attendant who comes on to the FBI witness with her coffee-tea-or-me smile (he's so boring that she must like him because he's in first class) the British snob businessman with hair plugs the princess who totes a chihuahua named Mary-Kate in her designer handbag the Diddy-lite hip-hop star with his What's Happening!! posse the leering co-pilot who's about as suave as Ron Burgundy the flight attendant who's taking her final voyage before law school, played by token actress-you've-actually-heard-of Julianna Margulies - all deserve to be terrorized because they're such sketchy and forgettable Airport '06: A New Beginning Jane and Johnny One-Notes. That chop-socky villain isn't the only relic from the '70s so is everyone on the plane. The giant boa constrictor, with its widening jaws, gets the best moments, and I wish it had more of them.
Byron junkit movie#
I enjoyed seeing a rattler with half its body wriggling down some poor woman's eye socket, but after a handful of tasty attacks like these, the movie has nowhere to go.
They'll chomp on anything that sticks out, from tongues to more, you know, sensitive appendages, but the violence grows a bit too baroque too early. The snakes, a zoological Whitman's Sampler of rattlers, pythons, cobras, and exotic intercontinental species, are not shy. Ellis' idea of tension is to cut the lights in the cabin to a twilight murk and overdose us with shaky-cam as the plane is jostled by a thunderstorm, with its pilot dead of a heart attack. The mostly digitized snakes curl through the airplane's bowels so readily that you quickly get used to them, and director David R. Is "Snakes on a Plane" a cheesy fun bad movie or a bad movie, period? I'd say about half and half. Their gruesome demise is just a gag, a momentary production number. They are meat, like the pretty idiots who get terrorized by psychos in dried-skin masks. To call these folks victims would be overstating it. The snake hangs in the air, then opens its fangs and pounces, clomping down on the girl's naked breast. You know what you're in for as soon as the first toxic leatherneck slides down a hole in the lavatory, where a sexpot and her surfer boyfriend are working on their membership in the mile-high club. Yet what, exactly, is the joke? If this cornball exploitation disaster movie had been called Anaconda 3: Flight of Fear (or, as was once planned, Pacific Air 121), we could all stop pretending that there was something exotically tacky about it.īut enough highbrow critical analysis! Why are there motherf-in' snakes on this motherf-in' plane? Because Eddie (Byron Lawson), a gangster who preens like a Bruce Lee impersonator, has stashed dozens of the slithery, poisonous suckers aboard a double-decker red-eye flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles (they're stowed in the animal-cargo hold, in boxes that are triggered to open via computerized timer), all to keep Sean (Nathan Phillips), an FBI witness, from testifying against him. For months, the anticipated trashiness of Snakes on a Plane has been a marketing hook in the form of a universally shared in-joke, as the bloggy chatterers, in their very mockery, have made themselves part of the hype machine. That, of course, is just what everyone is getting excited about. It acknowledges, with a bluntness that passes for a wink, what the vast majority of Hollywood titles do not: that the movie it's adorning is a concept, nothing more, one that wears its brain-deadness on both lapels. (ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY) - "Snakes on a Plane" sounds like a title that "Entourage's" Ari Gold might pitch to his favorite client (''snakes on a plane - BOOM!'').