Flight displays too much turbulence

Rating: 5/10 (8 February 2013)

At the absolute high points in this movie, I was mildly amused - or should I say, not bored. At its low points however, I felt irritated with the characters, exasperated with the story and the way it was unfolding, and generally just not interested. The problem with Flight is that there seem to be more low points than high points.
Denzel Washington plays Whip Whitaker, yes that's his name. It's almost like they put a proxy name in the screenplay drafts and then couldn't be bothered changing it at a later point. Anyway, Whip is a pilot with a drug and drinking problem. If you can get over the fact that pilots go through extensive physiological, psychological and personality evaluations in 'real life', and as a result it would be extremely rare that a man like 'Whip' would ever be licensed to begin with - you might not mind this movie. I got over that part, I also begrudgingly got over the fact that Whip has apparently had a drinking problem for 11 years, yet it seems he's managed to stay licensed this whole time - completely unlikely as it is.
Seriously - I'd believe this character could get away being a bus driver, but not a pilot bu a long shot.
Then there is the flight sequence, which doesn't even last that long. Now that I think about it, it's good it didn't last that long. This film was supposed to be a realistic drama accomplishment. Yet the flight sequence that basically kicks off the events of this movie is something you might see in an action film written by stoned high school drop outs.
It's hard to enjoy the movie to it's potential when you can't really feel sympathy for any of the characters - especially not Whip. The other characters are all one dimensional. Kelly Reilly plays Nicole, who for poorly explained reasons is also a junkie. Her story is touched on at the beginning but seems to falter near the end. Probably for the better, she was a character with an inconsistent background and the movie was already 2 hours long.
The story is a mess and many plot points are not explained in detail. They are just briefly skimmed through in the hope that audiences would get the gist of it by themselves. The point of the story is completely lost on me though. This is not a character study as other reviewers would have you believe. Why? Because most of the characters are only touched on briefly - "Hi I'm Whip, I'm a Pilot, and I like to drink". That sums it up, so how is that a study of a complex character? It's also not an exploration into addiction, because the characters addictions in this film are painfully one dimensional - "I'm an addict" - OK, why? What made you an addict? What made you decide to stop?.
If the 'point' you were trying to preach to us for 2 hours was that addiction is bad - you could have tried with a little less cigarette and alcohol product placement. By a little less, I mean cut down from having brands appear every 2 minutes, to every 5 minutes or something.
The ending is painfully forced on us. Throughout the film, Whip is convinced that his drunken state didn't cause the crash, and goes out of his way to harass people into relaying the same thoughts to interviewers. Yet at the end, he tearfully admits he was drunk so as to avoid having a (dead) stewardess who he had a relationship with be painted in a negative light. I mistakenly took this same stewardess for a hooker at the beginning of the film due to their lack of chemistry. Whip didn't seem to care for her either, yet if you watched the ending without seeing the first 5 minutes of this film - you would think he was deeply in love with her.
While Flight doesn't crash and burn, it doesn't ever really soar to it's potential either.