This Kept Me Interested - For About An Hour

Rating: 5/10 (23 April 2016)

The most unfortunate thing about "Non-Stop" is that it's 1:46 long. That last :46 was just too much for me. Seriously - I was enjoying this for the most part for the first hour or so, and then it just lost me. Not that I didn't understand it - it just stopped interesting me. Too much that was happening just wasn't making enough sense. Sure, I get that in an action movie you sometimes have to suspend your disbelief - but I was being asked to suspend too much disbelief.
First was the rather - shall we say - convoluted plan that the bad guys had hatched. The story revolves around a plan to extort $150 million from an airline - or someone - and a threat to kill one passenger every twenty minutes unless the money is paid. Or the plane is going to be blown up. Or it's going to be blown up anyway regardless I guess. Whatever. This plot depended on so many little details going absolutely right. It depended on things happening to the split second. Or, if it didn't depend on that, still so many things happened right on the split second that it was bewildering. Like the twenty minute thing. Liam Neeson's Agent Marks could literally set his watch by this timing. The deaths happen literally at the 20 minute mark - not 20 minutes and 30 seconds, or 19 minutes and 45 seconds, but literally at 20 minutes - even though there was no way the plotters could have possibly controlled everything that needed to happen so precisely. And how did these guys plan to escape anyway? Sure they had parachutes. So they were going to jump into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean? (This was a flight from the US to London.) What would they do then? And how did they set up all these bank accounts - hundreds of them apparently - all around the world? What? And how did they know that Agent Marks was going to be on this specific flight? Because a lot of their plan seemed to revolve around their knowledge of some of the troubled personal details of his life. And - if his superiors trusted him so little that they wouldn't believe him when a crisis on a flight came up and would readily accept that he was actually a suspect, why was he still an air marshall in the first place? It was all mind-boggling.
And it worked for a while. Convoluted? Unbelievable? To the point of ridiculousness? Sure it was, but I could hang in for about an hour in the hope that some sense would be made of this. But it never was. After about an hour I just started thinking how long it was taking this movie to end. Which is never a good sign.
There were things I liked about it. Liam Neeson was pretty good. Generally speaking I like Liam Neeson. He worked in the role of Marks - the air marshall dealing with a lot of personal demons. Julianne Moore was pretty good as Marks' seatmate on the plane - the one passenger he seemed able to trust and so he brings her into the circle and she starts to help him get control of the situation. I appreciated the fact that no one decided to introduce a romance between these two. That would have made me roll my eyes a lot sooner than I did. I appreciated the fact that the only Muslim on board the plane was a good guy. I did wonder about his medical knowledge. He identified himself as a molecular neuroscientist or something. Why? Why not just call him a doctor? There seemed no particular reason to make him a molecular neuroscientist if he was going to be providing medical care. But at least he wasn't one of the bad guys.
This worked for a while. There was just too much going on that made the whole story implausible. (5/10)