Never really takes "Flight"

Rating: 6/10 (11 November 2012)

A watchable but decidedly not a great film. Washington is his usual opaque self here, and his struggle to convey actual emotion is at times more difficult to watch than are the tough feelings he's supposed to be expressing. For years I've had the sense that there was something slightly cold and detached inside Washington as an actor. It's a style that serves him very well in hard-ass, semi-sociopath roles such as in Training Day, but makes him hard to believe when he plays characters with real emotional depth and whose inner turmoil ought to make us weep. All in all, the pacing of this film is mind-numbingly slow and dramatic tension is diluted by too many inconsequential scenes, including most of the opening sequences involving co-star Kelly Reilly, whose parallel story of addiction turns out to have just about exactly nothing whatever to do with anything. A scene involving a conversation in a hospital stairwell among Washington, Reilly, and James Badge Dale as a mysterious, incoherent, smack-talking terminal cancer patient– which the audience is supposed to understand as A Deeply Meaningful Message – is one of the most glaring of the film's several painfully superficial shaggy dog stories. The film's moment of Great Moral Reckoning, which comes as Washington's Whitaker is on the witness stand during an NTSB hearing, is unbelievable from start to finish—first because the chief investigator would never have asked the question that results in Whitaker's epiphany and, second, because the film deliberately fails to provide the elements necessary to grasp why Whitaker behaves as he does in that moment. His decision seems arbitrary—as does his almost every act throughout the film. John Goodman, as Whitaker's pusher, reprises his Arachnophobia role to no great effect.