Quite good adult-level drama... yet...

Rating: 7/10 (8 March 2013)

...something is missing in this very finely-crafted but clearly imperfect film about a man struggling with his powerful, overwhelming addictions.
Denzel Washington hits all the marks perfectly as William "Whip" Whitaker, a seasoned commuter pilot captain for a small regional airline. We soon learn Whip has very serious personal problems.
In fact it isn't more than a few seconds into "Flight" that we know how bad Whip has it. The first shot of the movie is of his lover's - a flight attendant - fully-exposed breast, the next is of he snorting cocaine and drinking while she prances across the hotel room stark naked while he argues with his ex-wife over money. His lover, Katerina (a quite exquisite Nadine Valezquez who is there, apparently, to remind us husbands that women only have bodies like that in the movies), could make us think we're watching "Traffic" or "Blow" or "Scarface" save that Whip is an airline pilot.
After the hotel, Whip boards his jet and plops into the cockpit quite torqued on alcohol and drugs. He has a green co-pilot whom he has never met before and the weather is awful for take-off: Stormy, rainy, and windy, with rough cross-winds.
The take-off proves to be a challenge and the plane bucks like a bronco trying to get up in the air. A major "sphincter event" you might say but the seasoned Whip knows to drive the plane into a gap of the storm surrounding his jet. After a couple minutes of white-knuckling it Whip successfully finds clear skies on the short commuter flight from Orlando to Atlanta.
After things clear up Whip goes to the cabin to apologize for the rough take-off and as he does this manages to - out of view of the cabin, of course - drain two mini- bottles of vodka into a bottle of orange juice. He takes a few swigs and heads back to the cockpit. Bad enough he's flying while already drunk and high, but can you imagine an airline pilot drinking ON the flight? And that's just the beginning of how bad Whip's problems really are.
About 30 miles out from Atlanta the smooth sailing abruptly goes awry as the plane loses elevator control and hydraulics. The plane heads into a steep, almost straight-down nose dive with virtually no control for either pilot.
The extended action scene around the crash landing is easily reason enough to watch "Flight," no matter how much it sags in the middle. Whatever may be wrong with William "Whip" Whitaker, however drunk he may be, there is NO question he is in command as the plane hurtles toward the earth. He knows exactly what to do, driven by years of experience that have been honed into instinct. He calmly, confidently gives orders to his co-pilot and flight crew to try to pull it out of a dive. None work but then he hits on a notion to try to invert the plane to pull it out of the dive. Insane, yes, but the alternative is sure death. Engines flaming out, oil pressure dropping, parts of the plane flying off, everyone screaming, the young co-pilot clearly out of his depth, flight crew freaking out - Whip is unflappable. He even reminds the flight attendant helping him to tell her son she loves him so it will be recorded on the flight recorder.
After the inversion Whip is able to right the plane and, too far from an airstrip still - at this point with both engines flamed out he is literally gliding - sees a large field he can try to ditch the plane in to. The crash landing is rough, but, miraculously almost everyone on the flight survives including, naturally, Whip himself.
The remainder of the film is focused on Whip finally coming to grips with the many demons of severe alcoholism that have plagued him most of his life. Most pilots would be ordinary heroes after such a miraculous crash landing but Whip's menagerie of personal problems are brought to the fore as his union rep, a criminal attorney hired by the union to defend him (played brilliantly by Don Cheadle, one of my personal fave actors, too), and a happenstance love interest whom he meets in the hospital - she's in there because she ODed on heroin - after the crash all try to come to his rescue.
Pardon my aerodynamic puns, but there's quite a bit of drag in this second act. As excellent as Denzel is as a man who is in deep denial about how bad his problems really are, the struggles of the addict feel familiar to moviegoers. He never really pulls it together until the end, which feels much like a typical Hollywood movie ending of a lost soul redeemed.
As an aside I would argue the crash scenario used in "Flight" was taken from Alaska Airlines Flight 261 that crashed off Ventura, California back in 2000 that crashed for a very similar reason to the plane in "Flight": a worn jackscrew. I remember it well because I happened to be traveling that day in the same vicinity, heading back from Southern to Northern California for my employer at the time and the plane crashed just a couple hours before I was scheduled to head home that evening. Trust me that whole flight was a bunch of nervous nellies. Though the weather was clear and the skies smooth that day I think every even slight change in altitude felt like we were going to fall out of the sky.
Regardless of the relatively slack second act and prototypical Hollywood feel to the ending, "Flight"'s crash sequence makes it well worth a watch and the movie overall is well done and acted, even if the story falls short in several places.