another "lost weekend" remake but without the bite, ultimately "a lost opportunity"

Rating: 3/10 (9 November 2012)

I really wanted to like this movie but something besides the crash went terribly wrong. Of course Denzel is great, acting wasn't the problem, for the most part. To put it bluntly, the main disaster here was the director pulling punches, playing it safe. Remarkably, the supposed center piece of the movie, the crash, was actually completely irrelevant to the plot. Think about the setup, the pilot was not responsible for the crash and he saved the plane, for the most part, with very few deaths. The movie took great pains to make it clear how extraordinary this was, "everyone crashed the plane in simulations" etc. Well, did the pilot's alcoholism help this or hurt this performance? Simple question but this apparently had nothing to do with the moral point of the movie, so somehow his miracle flying and his alcoholism were never considered as related. There could have been many different solutions. E.G. perhaps the pilot missed something obvious in his walk around, so he both "caused" the crash and saved the plane, would have preserved the main arc of the story, kept the crash at the center of the movie but legitimately brought in the alcoholism. And the ending simply sucked, in prison, now wiser and honest........sigh, boring, as was the reconciliation with his son, feel good American tripe ending, double sigh.