Non-Stop Tedium

Rating: 1/10 (8 March 2014)

2014, what are you doing to me?! I normally feel like a positive person, but you have given very little to get excited about at the movies. Unfortunately Liam Neeson's latest uber-serious thriller, Non-Stop, is the next in line of bad action movies this year. It's a shame, because I was excited about this one. I love a good airplane nail-biter (Red Eye, United 93, the plane sequence in World War Z), but no one seems to be trying very hard here and it shows. Non-Stop is a soap-opera level suspense film about a troubled air marshal aboard a hijacked plane, in which he is a suspect. As you can see, the guys making this film aren't terribly interested in making a unique movie, but even worse they don't make an intriguing one. Every "twist" is seen from a mile away with the movie becoming abrasively preachy towards the end. The obnoxious style makes it feels like a film student just learned how to use his after-effects computer program. The music is over-bearing, not allowing the story to do any of the emotional weightlifting. If young guys made this movie, then it's forgivable to have these frantic choices; otherwise these decisions just come off as ineffective and pretentious. There is a decent action scene or two here and there, and some of the mystery works, but the cheap thrills rarely pay off emotionally and are too steeped in convolutedness to really work. The only thing "non-stop" here is the tedium. If you must see an action movie in theatres this week, see "Robocop", but skip this.