What Goes Up Must Come Down, And Vice Versa.

Rating: 7/10 (27 April 2013)

It's a pretty good movie, although it's a downer, and despite the fact that it was directed by Robert Zemeckis, most of whose output has so far been commercially oriented, abject junk.
The script by John Gatins is thoughtful and not hurried. There are no car chases, no fist fights, no blood-spattered walls, nobody's head is wrenched off by a maniac. It's a character study rather than an action movie, and the character is Denzel Washington's commercial airline pilot.
He wakes up in the morning with a flight a few hours ahead of him, shrugs off the beautiful nude girl, takes a swig of one of last night's many beers, does a line of cocaine, and -- WHAM! -- he's ready to fly.
He boards the airplane still stoned enough so that the two stewardesses, as well as his co-pilot, notice something is wrong. The first officer observes him queerly as Washington straps himself in and takes a hit off the oxygen mask. "Are you feeling alright, sir?", he asks.
The first officer, a youthful looking guy who looks as if he should be a flight attendant, must have second sight because Washington does not seem stoned to me. The fact is, Washington is not a good drunk. He proved that in "Courage Under Fire." If you want to see a good drunk, watch Paul Newman in "Verdict," and Newman never drank anything stronger than beer.
The airplane takes off with Washington in the left seat and hits some severe turbulence. The camera has evidently never flown through turbulent air in a large airplane because it is jarred from side to side as if it were being drawn on a cart over a rocky road. An aircraft wouldn't jiggle. It would feel more like an elevator that couldn't make up its mind whether to go up or down, but in any case would change its mind in a hurry and travel at high speed.
Then things get twisted. Finally out of the storm, Washington activates the autopilot and takes a half-hour snooze behind the while. Bang, and something in the airplane's controls go awry. So does the callow co-pilot, shouting panicky imprecations.
In the end, the National Transportation Safety Board determines that some threads were worn off in the bolts that held the elevators in position, and this put the airplane into a nosedive, from which Washington was able to recover by using his wits and his skills as a pilot. So far so good. But then the script ratchets up the sequential emergencies way beyond the red line. An engine cuts out, for instance. But what does that have to do with the failure of the elevator bolts in the plane's tail assembly? Nothing. Then the OTHER engine cuts out. Ditto. Then an engine catches fire. Ditto. And all this time the camera is being banged around like a ping pong ball. None of this is ever explained.
Well, as I said, it's a character study. Washington does okay with his role. Sometimes he pulls off the drunk role believably by minimizing it; an occasional bump against an item of furniture. He gets able support from Don Cheadle as a timid lawyer, Bruce Greenwood (I think) as good friend Charlie, and Kelly Reilly (there's a Polish name for you) as the recovering addict who falls in with him for a time. The rotund John Goodman as Washington's cheerful dope supplier provides some semi-comic entertainment. The guy who is the head of Washington's airline could be Bill Murray's double except for his speech, which sounds filtered through a corn cob.
Washington's character is sympathetic in that we all feel sorry for a guy in the grip of an addiction, but he's not really very likable. He lies all the time, about his drinking and everything else, until the cornball climax when he floods out and the unnecessary denouement in which he has a friendly chat with his estranged son under the blue summer skies.
I've picked on some of the film's weaknesses -- there are others -- but I don't mean to be too harsh. It's a thoughtful and engaging movie. Only it could have been much better if the formula had not been so strictly adhered to -- the guilty man finally and willingly confessing his sins. It's all laid out. Compare it to the ending of Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" or its cinematic offspring, "A Place In the Sun."