Distracting but ultimately full of holes, laughable and forgettable

Rating: Null/10 (3 June 2014)

Air Marshall Bill Marks is a troubled man – an alcoholic, an underachiever as a parent, cop and man, and really just has little going for him. Assigned to a direct flight to London, Marks settles in but within a few hours of the flight taking off he gets a message on the closed network that one of the passengers will die n 20 minutes if he does not arrange for a substantial amount of money to be transferred to a bank account. With time ticking down, Marks tries to figure out what is going on, but when the first death comes he finds himself isolated in the air in a high-stakes game where he can trust nobody.
Although this film got pretty bad reviews I still wanted to see it since I figured that in fairness it is probably going to deliver at the low level I was expecting from it. In this regard it is actually quite watchable for someone who was recovering from a minor operation and just looking to have something to distract. The plot is as nonsensical as it sounds; I really wondered how they were going to make it all work, but the answer is that they don't. The writers seem to hope that you will not think forward or backwards in any situation and just focus on the moment, whatever is happening. This level of belief suspension is too much to ask though and the plot holes and narrative nonsense does come thick and fast at times, really just hoping you don't care enough to kick back against it.
And in fairness I didn't care – which is not a glowing recommendation but nothing about it all made me care one bit. What remains from there are lots of professionally mounted moments of tension, with Neeson doing his new tough guy thing and the closed location doing its bit to add to the tension. It works at a very low level but I would be lying if I said I wasn't at least slightly entertained by bits of it. The problem is that it is a big deal film with a big cast and presence, and it is not unreasonable to hope that it would have been better. Ultimately though it is undone by its own lack of interest in the plot – it is only ever about the tension of the moment and the writing is roundly poor, from plot points to specific dialogue. It distracts at a very low level but ultimately it is full of holes, laughable and forgettable.