Denzel at His Best

Rating: 8/10 (26 February 2013)

The main reason I don't like going on planes is because of movies like Flight. Flight is a surprising story about a drunken pilot, Denzel Washington, who makes an impossible move in landing his damaged aircraft with 102 souls onboard. Denzel delivers possibly his best performance of his career and giving him an Oscar nomination. The story starts about a plane crash, but turns into a man's emotional problems with drugs and alcohol. This should be interesting.
I knew this movie was about alcohol addiction and not so much about the crash. In the very first scene, Denzel Washington wakes up in a hotel room with who I'm assuming is a prostitute. His room is a mess and he grabs a bottle and starts to slurp it down. His phone rings and he starts arguing with his ex-wife. While this is going on the woman is just walking around getting changed and he has to fly a plane in less than an hour. The scene ends with him doing a line of coke and then him leaving to fly the plane. That opening scene made such an impact I knew this movie was going to be good. This was the very first scene of the movie.
The actual sequence of the crash itself was very interesting. Washington keeps his composure and knows exactly what he is doing. You would never know he was drunk but the scene looked and felt real. The danger was intense and the shot of the plane flying upside down was a thing of beauty. He lands the plane and then the controversy starts. The whole idea of the movie is to keep him out of jail and blame the crash on the faulty equipment. This movie had strong acting, emotional scenes, and very believable throughout.
The drug and alcohol abuse may have been stretched a bit. They show how much he drinks all over the place. He gets into his car and takes out a handle of vodka and drinks straight from it like its water. I feel like if a man drank and did this much coke, he would be dead. He meets a girl who is a recovering alcoholic at the hospital and they create one of my favorite scenes I have ever seen.
It is a few days after the crash and Denzel needs a cigarette so he goes in the stairwell to smoke one. Who does he see, but the recovering alcoholic and heroin addict. They start talking and a cancer patient comes up the stairs and joins the conversation. The conversation these three have lasts about 5-10 minutes but when it ended I remember thinking I could have watched that for another few hours. It was so entertaining and what6 they were talking about was so real and true.
So Denzel and this woman have a thing and hook up. Her character is one I really don't enjoy. She serves her purpose in the story and shows how the alcohol pushes people away, but she is in the movie and then she leaves, and never comes back. She comes, she goes, and she is forgotten. I had a problem with that. It was a flaw in the movie. She was introduced as a major character with major importance, and then she leaves. I don't have a problem with leaving, but a problem, with not coming back. That is really my only problem, other than the ending of the movie is so predictable. There is really only one outcome and everybody knows it, even the characters in the movie.
Denzel Washington is absolutely fantastic in this role. He plays a great drunk. All of his scenes are real and it is amazing how well he got into the character. I knew he had talent, but this was raising the bar to the next level. Although he did not win the Oscar, he definitely deserved the recognition and the nomination. You can see the struggles he faces through his acting throughput the entire movie. He wants to stop drinking and a few times he tries but he gets sucked in again and again. John Goodman is hilarious for the short times he is in the movie. He was good, as always.
Overall, Flight was an amazing movie with some of the best acting in recent memory. Goodman is funny, Washington is powerful, and the supporting cast worked really well too. Most actors had good chemistry and we could see that on screen. The movie had a few holes and slowed down in the middle but it had a strong finish and an overall great story. Flight deserves the Oscar nomination for best picture. Denzel Washington deserves the nod for Best Actor in a leading role, and Flight gets the WillyT Seal of Approval.