A surprisingly good flight undone by its bumpy landing.

Rating: 5/10 (26 February 2014)

Non-Stop - the latest installment in Liam Neeson's ongoing career renaissance as a geriatric action hero - is an odd beast. Its premise and trailer hint at a ridiculous, campy story, one that can enjoyed with very little concern for logic or reality. What's surprising about Non-Stop is that its first half actually shows great promise as a solid, rather serious action thriller, particularly with director Jaume Collet-Serra ladling heaps of tension into the narrative. Ironically, it's when the film veers irretrievably into ridiculous, campy territory that it crashes and burns.
Bill Marks (Neeson), a federal air marshal, settles himself in for a transatlantic flight. With a well-trained eye, he scopes out his fellow passengers in first class, including his chatty neighbour Jen (Julianne Moore), but doesn't spot anything amiss - until, that is, he receives an ominous text message demanding a wire transfer of US$150 million into an off-shore account. Failure to comply, he is informed, will result in someone on the plane dying every twenty minutes.
A bit of an outrageous premise, it's true, but Collet-Serra actually manages to make it work - kind of. The film's first hour unfolds with tension and tiny twists aplenty, as Bill races against time to trace the source of the threatening messages but keeps coming up empty. The first death is a stroke of story-telling genius, just as it's actually possible to see the metaphorical noose tightening around Bill's own neck as he comes under suspicion for causing rather than trying to stop the mayhem on the plane. Red herrings are liberally baked into the film's plot, to the extent that audiences - and Bill - will be rather effectively kept guessing about the culprit for quite a while.
There's even much to enjoy in the complicated dynamics among the passengers on the plane; they range in response from belligerent (Corey Stoll's rage-filled cop) to terrified (Scoot McNairy's Tom Bowen), from helpful (Nate Parker's Zack White and Omar Metwally's Doctor Nasir) to antagonistic (Anson Mount as Bill's colleague, Jack Hammond). Given his troubled backstory, Bill has a bit of a prickly relationship with flight attendant Nancy (Downton Abbey's Michelle Dockery). It all adds welcome tension, drama and even comedy to the flight, and contributes red herrings galore to the plot, as Bill struggles to determine who he can trust.
But surprisingly good things must come to an end, and so it is for Non-Stop. The film's final act sees it degenerate from fairly well-plotted thriller to nonsensical mile-high melodrama. The entire plot in which Bill is ensnared - so tautly fascinating at the start - winds up making very little sense, whether in emotional or psychological terms. The grand, crazy opera of it all is only exacerbated by the outrageously action-packed denouement: this is where the film was clearly headed all along, with fisticuffs, gunplay and explosions the order of the day, but it actually feels sillier because of what came before.
The cast is, broadly, very good. Neeson actually doesn't phone it in, just looks grim and determined as he always does in this little sub- genre of films he's built up around himself. Moore is at least a hundred times too good for this material, and so lends her character considerable empathy - and a hint of suspicion too, since it's hard to imagine an actress of her calibre and stature signing on to this film if she didn't have something meatier to do. Dockery radiates uptight tension, a Lady Mary of the sky, and Nyong'o - so arresting in 12 Years A Slave - is essentially a filler character as another flight attendant who flits around in the background looking worried all the time.
On the whole, Non-Stop is enjoyable, particularly in its gripping, tense first half. It's surprisingly rich and well-executed, as Bill struggles to make sense of an apparently routine job gone quite badly wrong. But the film struggles to become a more coherent whole, especially when it plunges into overblown action territory. That's where, one suspects, it was always intended to reside, but this is a descent that winds up feeling like a letdown, especially in contrast with its smoother take- off and flight.