Heavy right-wing ideological bent (if you like that sort of thing)

Rating: 5/10 (4 December 2014)

"Flight" takes us through some of the more conservative ideological elements you'll see in notoriously liberal Hollywood's output. The baddies come from the ranks of unionized workers - specifically the airline pilot's union. Bruce Greenwood's union representative gets portrayed as actively protecting the union's interest without regard to the flying public's safety from alcohol and drug-dependent pilots especially Denzel Washington's lead character here. Well below Greenwood's character on the morality scale lies Don Cheadle's union lawyer who delights in using technical arguments to squash evidence of Washington's "Whip" wrong-doing. White Southern businessman Avington Carr (Peter Gerety) gets to be the moral consciousness of the piece willing to let the airline go down rather than hide Whip's wrongdoing and outraged that it becomes clear that Whip will walk if he can just stay sober and keep up the lies.
As far as the actual movie behind the ideology, it famously received criticism for a marketing campaign portraying it as an action movie when it is very much a television-scale interior drama with a brief CGI-heavy plane crash as the only real action. Theoretically, staging the plane crash ate a lot of the budget as the remainder of the film seems distractingly cheap. Particularly in a scene where Whip drunkenly attacks his wife and son in the foyer of their Atlanta house, the audience is very aware they are watching a movie. Another major element that breaks the suspension of disbelief is Zemeckis' use of the Rolling Stone's version of "Sympathy for the Devil" in the scenes where John Goodman's drug dealer appears. Contrasted against largely silent scenes, the choice feels gimmicky. Not gimmicky but without real importance is the "B-Plot" of Katerina Marquez's drug addiction - she never really develops or plays a meaning part in Whip's coming to terms with his addictions and lies.
Having said all this, kudos to Zemeckis and writer John Gatins for a realistic and honest portrayal of a unpleasant anti-hero much in the vein of "Mad Men"'s Don Draper and "Breaking Bad"'s Walter White. The motivations feel real across the cast. The writing could have used a few light moments as the story is more something you get through (like Carson McCormick's "The Road") than actually enjoy.
In short, fans of realistic television dramas who do not need someone to root for and are comfortable with moral ambiguity (cleverly the movie leaves open the question of whether Whip's intoxication during the crash actually helped him stay calm and tap into his creativity to same the passengers), this may be a film you would enjoy.