Starts with promise, loses plot at the end

Rating: 5/10 (8 September 2014)

Non-stop is another Liam Neeson action flick, the type he surprised everyone with in Taken and is now wearing out somewhat! In this film, he plays Bill Marks (No, no, not Bryan Mills - pay attention) a washed up loser with tragedy in his past who has, luckily for everyone else, found employment as an Air Marshal. What could go wrong! The film starts well enough, the familiar drudgery of airport queues and security, then onboard the plane. (Note to the writers. British Aqualantic? Really?) There are clearly clues ongoing here, furtive glances between the crew, Julianne Moore's character managing to sit next to Neeson's etc. Once airborne, Marks' starts to receive threatening text messages on his unusually archaic looking smartphone, a person unknown is planning to kill a passenger every twenty minutes unless they get $150m pronto. As the story progresses, it works well, there is tension, puzzlement and a clever twist in the first death. Things quickly fall apart and Marks' finds himself at the centre of suspicion rather than the saviour of the aircraft, after more deaths, mutiny by the passengers, and the discovery of a bomb, another clever twist reveals the truth.
And then it all falls apart. The rationale behind the hijack makes no sense, the pair of hijackers do not seem to work together.
The plane manages to descend so that a violent explosion of the bomb doesn't destroy it, although it looks like it should, and then - as if tacked on as an after thought - an emergency landing is made as completely unaffected pieces of the plane fail. In an entirely unnecessary scene, a section of the forward fuselage fails, endangering a young girl who Marks heroically saves, thus vindicating his torment over his own dead daughter. It was a silly, unrealistic scene that, added to the poor CGI, was the undoing of the film.
In short, what was a pretty good mystery thriller for 2/3 of the film, fell apart in the last 1/3.