thrilling ride at 40,000 feet!

Rating: 8/10 (28 May 2014)

Old man Liam Neeson does it again. His hulking energy and imposing screen presence makes Non-Stop an excellent action thriller. At 61, post Taken, Neeson is enjoying his second lease of Hollywood stardom, and his first as an action star. Seems his purple patch has no end in sight.
Non-Stop is a murder mystery much in the vein of an Agatha Christie novel, set 40,000 feet in the air, within the confines of an aircraft. Neeson plays Bill Marks, a down in the dumps US Air Marshall who takes to the bottle whenever he can to overcome his perpetual grief over the loss of his daughter. When at work in a non-stop flight from New York to London, he suddenly starts receiving threatening text messages demanding $150 million. Failure to meet the demand means someone in the flight would be killed every 20 minutes.
The person making these demands seem to know Marks well, at the same time looks like he is sitting in the plane itself. Bodies start to drop, and when Marks tries to find out the killer, he finds out that he is being set up. The airplane offers a wide array of characters- a drug dealing fellow Marshall, a NYPD cop, Julianne Moore's chatty friendly co-passenger, an Arab doctor, and a mobile software expert, among others. It is a claustrophobic scenario, and committing murders in front of everyone borders on the impossible. The magic of Non-Stop, then is to make all this believable.
Director Jaume Collet-Serra who has established himself with the 2009 horror flick, Orphan, and has directed Neeson earlier in Unknown, has shot 95% of the film is within the confines of an airplane, but he does so with style and pace, including a manic fight in a lavatory and a crazy emergency landing. He knows his star well, and uses his appeal to the max. As the gruff, flawed, and increasingly desperate hero- Liam Neeson currently has no equal. As the movie progresses and his character's tragic past is revealed, it comes to light that he will actually do anything it takes to save the people on the flight.
There are a lot of loopholes in the plot, but the thrill, intrigue, suspense, action and a star in full flow makes Non-Stop a highly recommended film- 8/10