Even Denzel can't carry the team alone

Rating: 7/10 (1 November 2015)

I've watched it twice. I didn't know what to think the first time.
Such an interesting premise: You have a dangerous job where you are responsible for people's lives and millions of dollars worth of equipment. You know that, as a piece of machinery, anything can ho wrong no matter how many times you check. Parts fail. People fail. Stuff just happens - whether its in an operating room or on a commercial jet.
Here, its of course the latter. Yet the nagging question: Did the parts, the people or both fail? And here the answer is the parts. The part failure shown brought down two real life airliners with grievous loss of life and two trashed expensive airplanes. Yet here, Whip (Washington) shows us what pilots, sober or not, can do in an emergency. I loved the way he played the incident through, so totally on top of everything. I was brought to mind of Chesley Sullenberger's feat on the Hudson River in NY city, no heroics, no drama just fly the plane down as gently as you can. And Whip does it on dry land with only 6 deaths.
Amazing? Yes, and he's hailed as a hero. But he knows he was lucky - as they say, you're okay until you run out of altitude, airspeed and ideas - and he knows he was drunk and high on cocaine too. So it's not as landing the plane was the miracle, the miracle was that in his condition he was able to think the problem through.
This is all so deep, and a hard subject to cover in a film without being trite. But TRITE it becomes at several points. The addition of the female character, for example, who gets and stays clean, tells you right off that some sort of confession or redemption is scheduled. The addition of the John Goodman character really put spice in the film and I dare one of you to tell me that anyone but Goodman could have pulled this role off. He was just so slick, he slid in and out of the scenes and that's amazing considering how incongruous his character is. Perfection! And as it is clear that our hero is going to get off the hook, which he could have done easily - without ANY harm done to any protagonists - he instead gives us a steaming pile of Hollywood horse**** on a silver platter with a candle on it. The following scene in jail is gratuitous, and leaves us to wonder if a better ending would have been for Whip to say "I don't know" - which I kept repeating out loud - and when he didn't I knew we were in for the typical studio ending. To heck with loose ends and continuity, right? The son? The Girl? Who what when where .... its not good when you walk away with those questions.
And because of this tomfoolery, completely lost here is the exquisite direction, cinematography and editing. All you film students, this is an exercise in perspective and composition. Zemeckis has a Kubrick like sense of photography - and a great DP, like Kubrick had, didn't hurt. But watchable and yes, enjoyable as it was, it could have been better.