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Flight: new york film festival review.

Denzel Washington stars in the Robert Zemeckis drama about an airline pilot who saves dozens of lives but faces prison because of drugs in his system.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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Denzel Washington stars in director Robert Zemeckis’ "Flight," which receives a gala screening Oct. 18 in Abu Dhabi.

After 12 years spent mucking about in the motion capture playpen, Robert Zemeckis parachutes back to where he belongs — in big-time, big-star, live-action filmmaking — with Flight . A gritty, full-bodied character study about a man whose most exceptional deed may, ironically, have resulted from his most flagrant flaw, this absorbing drama provides Denzel Washington with one of his meatiest, most complex roles, and he flies with it. World premiering as the closing night attraction at the 50th New York Film Festival, the Paramount release will be warmly welcomed by audiences in search of thoughtful, powerful adult fare upon its Nov. 2 opening.

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Onscreen for nearly the entire running time, Washington has found one of the best parts of his career in Whip Whitaker, a middle-aged pilot for a regional Southern airline who knows his stuff and can still get away with behaving half his age. In the film’s raw opening scene, he’s lying in bed in Orlando at 7 a.m. after an all-night booze, drugs and sex marathon with a sexy flight attendant. With a little help from some white powder, he reassures her they will make their 9 o’clock flight for Atlanta.

The Bottom Line Denzel Washington excels as a pilot whose heroics hide a very dark side.

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The gripping 20-minute interlude that follows has in every way been brilliantly orchestrated by Zemeckis and will mesmerize and terrify audiences in a manner that will make the film widely talked about, a must-see for many and perhaps a must-avoid for a few. The 102 passengers strap in for what could be a bumpy flight; the weather looks awful. Rain is pelting down and the sky is dark, but it’s all in a day’s work for Whip, who settles into the cockpit and greets a new co-pilot ( Brian Geraghty ), while also sneaking two bottles’ worth of on-board vodka into his orange juice.

With his night’s companion Katerina ( Nadine Velazquez ) working the passenger compartment, Whit zooms up into the clouds, shaking up the passengers and scaring the co-pilot as he rams at top speed toward a pocket of clear sky. Having achieved momentary calm, Whit actually falls asleep at the controls, but not for long; the jet loses its hydraulics and suddenly plunges into an uncontrolled descent, its engines on fire. After lowering the landing gear and dumping fuel, Whip freaks everyone out and creates total chaos onboard by inverting the plane, manually forcing it to fly upside-down to achieve some stability on the way down before righting the ship at the last minute to attempt an emergency landing in a field.

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This breath-shortening sequence is eye-poppingly realistic, with cutting Eisenstein would have admired, right down to the exquisite details of Jehovah’s witnesses scrambling to get out of the way on the ground as the plane’s wing clips the steeple of their rural church. Miraculously, the plane lands more or less intact, although six people die. For his part, Whip is hospitalized with minor injuries. His daring and ingenuity having saved most of the passengers from certain death, he becomes an immediate national hero.

But this is not a role Whip is keen to embrace. Depressed to learn that Katerina was among those killed, he’s visited by old flying buddy and now pilot’s union rep Charlie Anderson ( Bruce Greenwood ), as well as by his Lebowski-world drug dealer Harling Mays ( John Goodman ), whom he instructs to keep the vodka away. At the same time, Whip meets red-headed Nicole ( Kelly Reilly ), an addict hospitalized after an o.d., with whom he develops a certain affinity.

Anxious to avoid the lurking media, Whip slips away to his family farm to hide out. The property belonged to his grandfather; his father’s Cessna, in which Whip learned to fly, is still in the barn and the cabinets are full of booze, which he methodically pours out. If he could stay here forever, unmolested and unnoticed, you suspect he would. But a tempest of trouble awaits him in the real world, as he learns what he had to already know: Toxicological tests have revealed the booze and coke in his system at the time of the crash, which could result in serious prison time.

VIDEO: Denzel Washington’s ‘Flight’ Trailer Hits 

From this point on, the original screenplay by John Gatins ( Coach Carter, Dreamer, Real Steel ) closely charts the ins and outs and ups and downs of Whip’s addiction, a struggle he shares part-time with Nicole. Unlike him, she has nothing to show for her life, as well as no prospects unless she shapes up once and for all. When Whip learns what’s in store for him legally, he hits the bottle again just as Nicole goes on the wagon, which doesn’t stop them from having a brief liaison. Her AA sessions are not for him.

Whip also resists the help of attorney Hugh Lang ( Don Cheadle ), a stiffly humorless man who’s obviously good at his job, as he paves the way for his client to get off if he behaves himself. That, then, becomes the major question as he approaches a big public hearing before the chief inquisitor ( Melissa Leo ), along with whether Whip can cut through his layers of self-protection and denial to finally confront his devils and the truth about himself.

The close scrutiny of Whip’s internal currents cuts two ways, on one hand investing the drama with a deeply explored and complex central character, while on the other weighing it down a bit too much with familiar addiction issues for which the possible solutions are ultimately limited and clear-cut. The script commendably advances the notion that Whip had the cojones to make his bold move to save the plane because he was high but then perhaps prolongs the search for exactly how he’ll have to pay the price. At 139 minutes, the film takes a bit longer than necessary to do what it needs to do.

VIDEO: THR’s Scott Feinberg and Todd McCarthy Chat About the New York Film Festival

But Washington keeps it alive and real at all times as a man who, a failed marriage and an estranged son aside, would seem to have had things his own way most of his life and has never been forced to take a clear-eyed look at himself. The actor hits notes that are tricky and nuanced and that he’s never played before, contributing to a large, layered performance that defines the film.

Reilly (Sherlock Holmes), Greenwood, Goodman and Cheadle are all solid in functional supporting roles. As a live-action director, Zemeckis hasn’t lost a step during his long layoff; even though most of the settings are prosaic and even unphotogenic — hotel and hospital rooms, downscale dwellings, conference rooms — he and cinematographer Don Burgess deliver bold, well conceived images that flatter the actors. The exceptional and seamless visual effects for the traumatic flight sequence make that experience linger and reverberate throughout the entire film, just as it does for the characters who lived through it.

Venue: New York Film Festival (closing night) Opens: November 2 (Paramount) Production: Image Movers, Parkes + MacDonald Prods Cast: Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle, Kelly Reilly, John Goodman, Bruce Greenwood, Brian Geraghty, Tamara Tunie, Nadine Velazquez, Peter Gerety, Garcelle Beauvais, Melissa Leo Director: Robert Zemeckis Screenwriter: John Gatins Producers: Walter F. Parkes, Laurie MacDonald, Steve Starkey, Robert Zemeckis, Jack Rapke Executive producer: Cherylanne Martin Director of photography: Don Burgess Production designer: Nelson Coates Costume designer: Louise Frogley Editor: Jeremiah O’Driscoll Music: Alan Silvestri R rating, 139 minutes

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Life Takes Nose Dive, and Settles Into an Abyss

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By Manohla Dargis

• Nov. 1, 2012

There is a single image in “Flight” of a miniature bottle of vodka that’s more nerve-racking than almost anything in the thrillers released this year. Shot in close-up with a room blurred in the background, the bottle looks so very big for something so small, like a totem of some mystical deity. It represents a million earlier drinks downed in a forlorn, existential frenzy, but it also resonates with a foreboding that the director Robert Zemeckis sustains for several unsettling seconds. What gives the image such tension, an almost unbearable throb of suspense, is that you know that right outside the frame is a man who is just dying for that drink. And you’re dying a little along with him.

The man going down, down, down is Whip Whitaker. Played by a titanic Denzel Washington, he’s a veteran commercial pilot whose greatest vocation should be his flying but, for this and that reason, has become his drinking. Whip doesn’t drink to excess and quietly fade, he stumbles, shouts, flails, blacks out. Mr. Zemeckis, directing his best movie since “ Cast Away ” (2000), about a different kind of disaster, makes you see that Whip is a beautiful indulger, as does the erotically hyped-up Mr. Washington, with his switchblade strut and aviator shades. As crucially, they also show you the ugly, mean, angrily unrepentant drunk, the one whose sunglasses hide bloodshot eyes and who, when he passes out on the floor, needs someone to tilt his head so he doesn’t choke on his own vomit.

The story, by the screenwriter John Gatins , turns on a crash that takes place soon after the movie opens. During a hop from Orlando, Fla., to Atlanta in a bad storm, a catastrophic event occurs. Whip manages to land the plane, but after saving others, begins losing himself. His unraveling brings on mood swings, rock oldies and a genre sampler, with the movie shifting from thriller to romance, family melodrama, legal drama and bitterly delivered inspirational tract. The calamity stirs up a mystery — what did Whip do, and was he sober when he did it? — feeding the inquiry and his relationships, including with a drug addict (the lyrically melancholic Kelly Reilly); his son (a fine Justin Martin); a friend (a blustery John Goodman); and a lawyer (Don Cheadle, doing a lot with little).

Even more than the plane crash in “Cast Away” (about a survivor, played by Tom Hanks, marooned on an unpopulated island), the accident in “Flight” is freakishly real; it’s one of those big-screen nightmares that will inspire fear-of-flying moviegoers to run home and Google car rental deals and Greyhound schedules. It’s a showstopper, with thrashing inverted bodies amid sickening screams and engine noises. The coordinated chaos makes a sharp contrast with the movie’s equally pivotal low-key opener, which introduces Whip as he groggily wakes in a hotel room, swigs some booze and leers at the naked woman, Katerina (Nadine Velazquez), bent over next to him. It’s initially amusing to see Mr. Washington, who excels at square-jaw decency, getting down and dirty.

Mr. Zemeckis sets this scene efficiently, using his restless cameras, the pinpoint editing and seemingly nonchalant performances to home in on details that will register more meaningfully later, like the hunger with which Whip looks at Katerina and the anger edging his voice as he talks to his ex-wife on the phone. Nothing in the scene registers as especially significant until, amid the chatter and subtly choreographed bodies and cameras, you learn that Whip is a pilot scheduled to fly that same morning. This bombshell doesn’t fully explode, though, until he leans over a line of coke and, with his head swooping straight at us — and the camera racing away from him just as fast — snorts it, punctuating the hit with an ecstatic shake of his head, the whites of his eyes shining.

He’s high as a kite, and you may be too, lifted by the contact high that great filmmaking gives you. Mr. Zemeckis is far from a reliable filmmaker. What he has are good pop-culture instincts and, at least until he became infatuated with motion-capture technology, a gift for harnessing technological innovations with stories that can turn into enlivening cinema, as he did in movies like “ Who Framed Roger Rabbit ” and segments of the “Back to the Future” trilogy. His infatuation with motion capture, by contrast, has produced a handful of dreary, animated experiments like“ The Polar Express .” To watch Mr. Zemeckis working fluidly in consort with Mr. Washington’s ferocious performance is to regret this director’s last, technologically determined decade.

Mr. Zemeckis is in very fine form in “Flight” and when he sends a camera whooshing down the aisle of the failing plane, the controlled movement both conveys the contained frenzy of the scene and visually echoes the chill racing along your spine. Here he achieves more than virtuosic display. By something more, I don’t mean the movie’s subject, which is, at its broadest, a tail-spinning alcoholic. Superficially, “Flight” is the sort of award-season entry that earns plaudits simply because its subjects are sanctified as important, serious. There’s seriousness in “Flight,” but not self-seriousness. And what distinguishes it is the balance of its parts and how its floating, racing cameras complement the nimble performances, rocking emotions and ups and downs of the story and music alike.

Although he and Mr. Washington bring you into the movie fast, Mr. Zemeckis seems almost to blow it right at the start, when he begins abruptly cutting between Whip and a willowy, seemingly unrelated redhead. She’s soon introduced as the drug addict, Nicole, who will become important to Whip, yet in her twitchy establishing scenes of buying and shooting dope, she feels like a miscalculation. Mr. Zemeckis’s penchant for matchy-matchy musical selections is similarly distracting, as with his use of the Cowboy Junkies’ version of the Lou Reed song “Sweet Jane,” when Nicole injects heroin so strong that it’s called the Taliban. Mr. Zemeckis may want to suggest that the song — its lyrics include “heavenly wine and roses/seem to whisper to me/when you smile” — is playing in her head or ours when she slides the needle in, but it’s a crude stroke.

Mainstream habits die hard, and there are other instances when Mr. Zemeckis dilutes his movie’s power, notably with broad comedy and predictable sermonizing. “Flight” is, of course, about survival, and not only the type promised by the somewhat misleading advertising, which focuses on the more shocking (and cinematic) nose-diving calamity instead of the bottle-tipping one. To that end, the story hits many familiar recovery beats, partly because transformation is the only way out when a star plays an addict in an American mainstream movie. Our national culture of resurrection has as great a stranglehold on movies as Hollywood narrative conventions do. (That partly explains the limited popular appeal of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Master,” in which deliverance remains insistently out of reach.)

It’s no surprise that “Flight” has salvation in mind. The shock is how deep Mr. Zemeckis and Mr. Washington journey into the abyss and how long they stay there. It can be tough for stars to play such unrepentantly compromised characters, as Mr. Washington does brilliantly here. Most charm up their villains, thinning the venality with charisma and winks at the camera; in “Training Day,” as a seductively corrupt cop, Mr. Washington’s magnetism made a mockery of the story’s moral posturing. There’s no such falsity in “Flight.” The inevitable redemption doesn’t erase what happened or ease the pain, and the performance remains astonishingly true to Whip’s harrowing aloneness and its cost. Once again, you can’t take your eyes off Mr. Washington, but this time you watch him with agony rather than just admiration.

“Flight” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The movie includes a sustained scene of a cataclysmic plane crash, as well as excessive drinking, drug use and the usual adult language.

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Flight Has Worthwhile Themes, Turbulent Delivery

• Jeffrey Huston Crosswalk.com Contributing Writer
• Updated Apr 16, 2013

DVD Release Date: February 5, 2013 Theatrical Release Date : November 2, 2012 Rating : R (for drug and alcohol abuse, strong language, sexuality/nudity, and an intense action sequence) Genre : Drama Run Time : 139 min Director : Robert Zemeckis Cast : Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle, Kelly Reilly, John Goodman, Bruce Greenwood, Melissa Leo

Captain "Sully" Sullenberger became one of our modern-day heroes when he successfully landed the disabled US Airways Flight 1549 into the Hudson River and saved every life onboard. In the days following that " Miracle on the Hudson " we came to learn what a man of integrity he was, to no surprise.

Now imagine if Sullenberger had been a coke-snorting alcoholic, was intoxicated during the crash at twice the legal limit, yet still achieved the same heroic level of success. Through circumstantial and moral complexities, that's the basic scenario Flight posits – which makes for a rather compelling What-If.

Understandably (though somewhat misleadingly) promoted as a thriller of sky-high valor, Flight is actually an examination of addiction. While that promotes values-based themes, and the need to grapple with God specifically, it does so by way of a hard-R honesty that depicts the spiral of addiction – from promiscuous sex and pervasive language, to mixing and taking hard narcotics – in all its squalor. Conservative viewers would champion the film’s message but be too offended to actually see it through.

He's clearly done this before. This is nothing new. He is unfazed. Whip takes the definition of "Functioning Alcoholic" to a whole new level by being in complete control of his world. He's not trying to make up for his deficiencies; he has a swagger. Then all hell breaks loose – but not because of him.

Instantly he is a national hero, but then the investigation begins. Every detail is scrutizined – including toxicology reports – as airlines, unions, insurers, and manufactureres compete in a high-stakes blame game. Despite Whitaker’s miraculous feat, and the cause no fault of his own, he becomes a likely target on which to lay responsibility. Specifically it’s not right, but fundamentally he’s not innocent.

After a decade-plus diversion into motion capture animated films like The Polar Express , director Robert Zemeckis ( Forrest Gump ) comes back to live-action in a riveting return-to-form. He crafts the story with a big-budget polish that never undercuts the material’s grit, and provides Washington a showcase on par with what Zemeckis staged for Tom Hanks in Cast Away . Washington gives a potent portrayal of a man wrestling with demons and losing, his brash exterior fighting to keep shame hidden. Over a legendary career, this will be one of the roles he’s rememebered for.

The incident, along with a possible prison sentence, brings Whitaker’s addictions into focus. Like most addicts, the tragedy initially wakes him up, even to the idea of quitting cold turkey. But also like many addicts that doesn’t last long, and when circumstances look grim he returns to his vices.  At every turn, just when the movie has you rooting for him, it depicts or reveals something so dark and repellent about Whitaker that it basically dares us to keep hoping. It’s an absolute emotional roller-coaster.

Eventually the matter of God Himself has to be wrestled with, and is. While not going into a deep faith-based depiction, the mixture of addiction and tragedy evoke the instinctive human question, “Where’s God in all this?” It starts with the legal “Act of God” categorization and becomes something more soul-searching. Which is 'The Act of God' here? The lives saved? The deaths? The crash itself? Having Whitaker at the helm? All of it? None of it? These questions come from not merely a need for answers but for control – the very thing addicts lack but are unwilling to admit.

At its core, that’s what Flight is really about – one man’s inability, and fear, to admit he’s lost control. Like any addict, Whitaker believes he can quit whenever he wants. But he can’t. There’s a scene late in the film about a Moment Of Truth decision. What makes it resonate is the hard fact that temptation will always find you. It has a way of sneaking past our firewalls of structure. Even accountability has its limits.

Don Cheadle  ( Hotel Rwanda ) and  Bruce Greenwood  ( Star Trek ) offer solid supporting work as the two men working to exonerate Whitaker despite disgust at his unrepentant conduct.  John Goodman  ( Argo ) is welcome comic relief as Whitaker’s pusher and enabler.  James Dale Badge  steals his one scene as a foul-mouthed terminal cancer patient who's found peace with God, but it’s virtual unknown  Kelly Reilly  who stands out as a fellow addict; her perfomance is deeply felt and human.

The keen insight Flight ultimately reveals is that the only way to overcome addiction is not through protection; it’s through confession. It’s in that moment, when the lies have finally stopped, that the heart whispers "God help me."

• Drugs/Alcohol Content : Excessive drinking and alchoholic consumption, drunkenness, throughout (depicted as destructive). Mixing of drinking and drugs. Several instances of smoking. A few scenes of snorting cocaine. One scene of a woman shooting up heroin. A couple of instances of drinking while driving. Characters discuss how to use some illegal drugs to counter the effects of others.
• Language/Profanity : Full range of profanities, at times pervasive. F-word is used often, as is the S-word, with occasional use of others including two instances of the Lord’s name in vain.
• Sexual Content/Nudity : Female full-frontal nudity in opening scene, seen a few times. A scene on a porn set. Backsides of nude women seen in background. Male nudity from behind. Another seen of male nudity from behind, but from a hospital robe. A woman lays in bed with nude back exposed. A man and woman kiss passionately as a precursor to sex. A joke is made about porn mags and masturbation . A crude reference to oral sex.
• Violence/Other : An extended harrowing sequence of a plane crash. Bloody bodies seen in aftermath.

Publication date : November 2, 2012

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Flight – review

A s Lloyd Bridges says in Airplane!: "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking!" – a declaration he later famously modifies to take in smoking, sniffing glue and doing amphetamines. Before seeing this, I had thought that, between them, and from different directions, Airplane! and the real-time 9/11 drama United 93 had more or less finished off the aeroplane disaster movie. But this flawed yet enjoyable film from screenwriter John Gatins and director Robert Zemeckis proves that it can still be kept airborne, with a little re-invention.

Flight looks very much like a fictionalised true story, based on some New York Times bestseller. Actually, it isn't. Gatins has built his film around a single extraordinary detail that emerged from a real-life US air disaster in 2000: the hair-raising theory that a passenger jet in apparently fatal freefall can be made to level out and go into a safe glide, if the pilot can just pull off one particular, terrifying manoeuvre. To try it, he has to be desperate, and probably very drunk.

There is some terrific white-knuckle tension: but where the genre traditionally puts the high aeronautical drama at the very end, Zemeckis wrongfoots the audience as to where in his film the oxygen-mask-dropping crisis is going to come, and what kind of film it is therefore going to be. As well an airplane-disaster movie, Flight is a solemn and faintly anti-climactic tale of personal growth and moral choices, with some religiose murmurings about survival and fate. The story's central love-interest strand is a bit superfluous (and the movie frankly sags in this area) but its star, Denzel Washington , tackles the juiciest of lead roles with gusto, and the finale is entertaining, when it looks as if our hero's life has once again gone into a screaming nosedive and is about to make what the airline industry euphemistically calls "uncontrolled contact with the ground".

Washington is Captain Whip Whitaker, a highly experienced airline pilot who is also a functioning alcoholic. We first see him in a hotel room on a stopover, and here I thought John Gatins was obeying a law of "sexposition", using sex to spice up exposition scenes. One of these is that when two sleazy guys need to discuss something, they have to do it in a pole-dancing club; another is that when a sleazy guy has to wake up in a hotel room, a naked woman must be getting dressed in the background. Actually, this isn't quite what's happening: Whitaker is having an increasingly serious affair with a stewardess, Katerina Marquez (Nadine Velazquez), and poor Katerina is one of Whip's enablers, the people who cover up his addiction.

Whip has awoken with a massive hangover, so to cure it and generally stay sharp, he takes a python-sized line of coke before heading out to the airport; he struts authoritatively on to the plane (discreetly later than Katerina) and to his young co-pilot's horror, treats himself to an oxygen livener before takeoff. He and his passengers are to face a horrifying situation, but for Whip, matters just keep getting worse. Using some pretty hefty plot tweaks and narrative contrivances, Zemeckis's movie plays out to a watchable conclusion. With the help of a beautiful recovering smack addict Nicole (Kelly Reilly) and his toughly loyal colleague Charlie (Bruce Greenwood), Whip must figure out what he must do to stay true to himself. But it could also be that he might need one final volley of substance abuse courtesy of his unspeakable dealer, Harling, played by John Goodman.

In some ways, Washington is giving us a variant on the character he played in Training Day : the uniformed authority figure with some serious off-the-record habits. There is something in Washington's natural gravitas and bearing which looks fascinating when it is mixed with sin. Washington is also very good at showing how skilled an addict is at "presenting" – at putting on a show of nothing being wrong.

Weirdly, this movie reminded me of an anecdote I heard the veteran performer Thora Hird recount about her father, who told her never to drink before going on stage, and to make a point of telling everyone about this rule. He admitted that she could probably drink a good deal without it affecting her; but the point was that if she made any innocent mistake at all, everyone would say she was a drunk. Poor Whip feels guilty, yet knows that he technically isn't. Maybe the zing of coke and booze even gave him inspiration at the controls on that terrible flight, but of course Whip knows that whatever the truth, his whole life is crashing. Flight is one of those films which starts to come to pieces when you start thinking about it afterwards, but with Zemeckis at the controls, it's a very enjoyable watch. Maybe not in-flight, however.

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Movie Review: 'Flight'

Kenneth Turan

Movie critic Kenneth Turan reviews Flight , starring Denzel Washington. Turan says Washington plays an intriguing — and morally ambivalent — hero.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And let's hear a review, nex,t of the latest movie starring Denzel Washington. Los Angeles Times and MORNING EDITION film critic Kenneth Turan has been watching "Flight."

KENNETH TURAN, BYLINE: Whip Whitaker, played by Denzel Washington, is introduced lying face down on a hotel room bed; after what has clearly been a night of debauchery, substance abuse, and very little sleep. So it's dismaying to discover that Whitaker is an airline pilot, scheduled to take the controls in a raging thunderstorm that very morning.

But even drugged out, Whitaker can still fly like the Red Baron. When his aircraft inexplicably plummets into an uncontrolled dive and seems headed for unmitigated disaster, Whitaker saves the day.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "FLIGHT")

DENZEL WASHINGTON: (as pilot Whip Whitaker) We're going to roll it, OK?

BRIAN GERAGHTY: (as co-pilot Ken Evans) What do you mean, roll it?

WASHINGTON: (as Whip Whitaker) Gotta do something to stop this dive. Here we go. I've got control.

TURAN: Not every single passenger, as it turns out, survives these heroics. And as a defense attorney - played by Don Cheadle - tells the pilot, the question is whether his bravery will be overshadowed by his formidable blood alcohol count.

DON CHEADLE: (as Hugh Lang) This toxicology report states that you were drunk. And if it is proven that your intoxication was the cause of the death of the four passengers, now we're going to look at four counts of manslaughter. That could be life in prison.

TURAN: Washington, as always, creates a complex character who is both wary and worried; a man who not only flies airplanes, but is also in flight from his own life. But the story that surrounds him is not as subtle or involving, for though "Flight" could have concerned itself with how to reconcile heroic actions with fallible human qualities, it heads in a more formulaic direction. Can Whip Whitaker stop drinking long enough to avoid becoming his own worst enemy?

None of "Flight's" other characters hold us the way Whitaker does, though fine acting helps bring them alive. Don Cheadle is appropriately spit-and-polished as that attorney; and John Goodman is outrageous - as only John Goodman can be - playing Whitaker's personal Dr. Feelgood.

JOHN GOODMAN: (as Harling Mays) What the hell kind of meds they giving you? Aprazolan - that's generic Xanax. Hydrocodone, that's generic Vicodin - probably Canadian. Where's the dihydromorphinal? Is this amateur hour? Get that doctor in here. You just saved a hundred people.

WASHINGTON: (as Whip Whitaker) Harling. You bring my smokes?

TURAN: When all else fails, "Flight" turns to Washington. His ability to convey the agony of a soul in torment, never lets us down even though the film that surrounds him never rises to his heights.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

INSKEEP: Ken Turan reviews movies for MORNING EDITION, and for the Los Angeles Times.

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The most memorable facet of chintzy coincidence thriller “2:22” is its strange timing. It arrives to theaters and VOD the same day as a JAY-Z album that also favors numbers, 4:44 . With time titles rarely making its way into any medium, what are the chances of two on the same day and for even numbers? Maybe it means something. Or, as with much of this overwrought movie, maybe it means very little at all. 

Michiel Huisman plays an air traffic controller who notices the patterns in life, as stated by his clunky opening voiceover. It helps him do his job where he is able to see flight plans with a savant quality (or at least that’s how it’s presented), but it starts to pop up elsewhere in his life. When biking to Grand Central Station in the mornings, he notices different people doing the same thing in the same order—women laughing, a person saying “can I help you?”, a car horn, etc. City ambience or something else? Even stranger, he sees very similar patterns at Grand Central station—couples hugging, a pregnant woman, a group of school kids—and at the exact time of 2:22pm, some type of malfunction happens at the station, glass randomly shattering or light bulbs exploding above. 

There’s an interesting point to explore in this concept about how things seem to run into pattern or repetition, but instead this movie is aimed towards a love story. There’s a meet-cute which is one for the books, in which he meets an art curator named Sarah ( Teresa Palmer , in a definitively thankless role) whose plane he almost caused to hit another plane on the runway. In the eloquence of this unnatural script, the humdinger exchange goes: “I was on that flight.” “I nearly killed you.” “No, you saved me.” Later on, Sarah’s jealous artist boyfriend Jonas ( Sam Reid ) puts on a hologram display that shows the exact images Dylan has been seeing. Is Dylan going crazy? Is everything he’s seeing every day just a coincidence, a one in a billion chance? There are even more threads that are created, involving a murder that happened 30 years ago at Grand Central station. Director Paul Currie has a handsome look for the movie but does not have the vision to make all of these magic beans grow into one captivating entity. 

Like "The Number 23" or " Knowing " before it, "2:22" breaks an unwritten rule about coincidences in movies, where if details in the script are made so obvious, of course patterns will arise. There is scant awe as the movie starts to create trends from what is going on, which feels like it’s more in service of screenwriters trying to pull off eight tricks at once. Halfway through “2:22” you’re watching it just to see if it will ultimately make sense. By the end it does, and for a wayward cheesy purpose that I will not spoil, but also cannot say I was that in the least amused by. 

“2:22” does not make a compelling case for rising actor Huisman as a sturdy lead, despite being shown everything he can do, from working out in his apartment, biking through city streets, or furrowing his brow while picking up his keys. Like the other human beings in this movie, his character registers quickly as wooden, and isn’t able to change that fate. As strange things happen in the world it just comes off more like he’s posing than presenting a curious intellectual thought, and he isn’t given much of a sense of humor to add a few more dashes to charisma. But if you’re a “Game of Thrones” fan who wants to see Huisman play the sexiest air traffic controller alive, “2:22” has that. 

The busy nature of the movie doesn’t make it work any better. There’s a whole first act about his work as an air traffic controller, complete with high-paced air traffic control work, that could largely be excised, even if it makes him look super cool and lets him say “punch it!” into a phone while in close-up. And as it builds up tension from close calls in other sequences, as when Dylan is driving in a cab and seemingly avoiding predestined accidents by milliseconds, the editing is too choppy to create tension. 

At the very least, the movie seems to concede through dialogue or stand-out visuals that it fails to achieve intellectual grandiosity, so it keeps things simple. Dylan says out loud key connections when they are made, which takes away from their profundity. But there is one amusing vision, where in his madness of trying to figure everything out in his apartment, he writes on a glass pane the very helpful phrase, “2:22 - BOOM!” 

With a movie like this, it’s hard to tell where the good idea ran out, as it seems to have been lost many drafts ago. “2:22” really just wants to be seen as clever, which often renders something not very clever at all. 

Nick Allen is the former Senior Editor at RogerEbert.com and a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

2:22 (2017)

Rated PG-13 for violence and some sexuality.

Michiel Huisman as Dylan

Teresa Palmer as Sarah

Sam Reid as Jonas

• Paul Currie

Writer (story by)

• Nathan Parker

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• Sean Lahiff
• Gary Woodyard
• Lisa Gerrard

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The movie follows the journey of Ranveer Malhotra, who against all the odds, has to face deadly obstacles on a plane in order to survive. The movie follows the journey of Ranveer Malhotra, who against all the odds, has to face deadly obstacles on a plane in order to survive. The movie follows the journey of Ranveer Malhotra, who against all the odds, has to face deadly obstacles on a plane in order to survive.

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Sam Kieldsen

Review: DJI Avata 2 Drone

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With their origins in the world of drone racing, FPV drones (that's first-person view for the uninitiated) offer a faster, smoother, and more exciting flying experience than the camera drones we've typically covered in the Gear section .

To use a gross oversimplification, if standard drones, like the new WIRED Recommended DJI Air 3 , fly like helicopters, FPV drones behave more like airplanes. While most drones are designed to remain as steady and level as possible in the air—all the better to provide a stable platform for photography and videography—FPV drones can bank, drift, climb, and plunge acrobatically, and even pull off loops, flips, and barrel rolls in the hands of a skilled pilot. Go to YouTube and have a look if you want to see how incredibly agile these things can be.

DJI’s Avata 2 aims to bring the skill requirements needed for FPV flight down, while still offering an exhilarating first-person experience. And I’m delighted to say it succeeds, turning me from a nervy novice into a gleeful, gap-threading adrenaline junkie in a matter of minutes.

A Complete Package

The Avata 2 is currently only purchasable in a Fly More bundle with the DJI Goggles 3 ($499) and DJI RC Motion 3 ($99), two new accessories launching at the same time. The former is a new headset with twin Full HD OLED panels beaming a live feed from the drone’s front-mounted camera directly to the wearer’s eyes. The latter is a one-handed controller used to steer and power the drone via tilting motions and a couple of control buttons. When it does become available, you'll be able to buy just the Avata 2 for $489 .

Depending on which of the two Fly More bundles you choose, you also get either one ($999) or three batteries ($1,199) , each good for about 23 minutes of flight on a full charge . The pricier bundle also comes with a cradle that can fast-charge three batteries sequentially, plus a well-made sling bag with capacity for drone, controller, cradle, batteries, and headset, plus cables, extra propellers, and memory cards.

When I turned the Avata 2, Goggles 3, and RC Motion 3 on, they immediately paired with each other, and, thankfully, as a glasses wearer I found the headset refreshingly accommodating. Its eyepieces adjust for inter-pupillary distance, and it has a diopter for correcting vision, so I was able to get a clear view of the displays, while the twist-to-adjust strap and weight distribution made it comfortable for extended periods.

The image quality from the micro OLED screens is sharp and bright, with no discernible lag from the drone cam. It can also be used to stand in for your eyes too. A double tap on the side of the headset switches from the drone to a front camera feed, allowing you to quickly check out your surroundings between flights without removing the goggles.

A quick note for UK residents: While lighter than the original DJI Avata, the 377-gram weight of the Avata 2 restricts where it can be legally flown. Like any drone of 250 grams or above, it must be kept 150 meters from residential, recreational, commercial, or industrial sites, and 50 meters away from uninvolved people. So if you buy one in the UK, be aware that you can’t just stroll down to your local park and fly it around.

Quality Controller

The RC Motion 3 may be the perfect controller for an FPV beginner like me. Once the drone is hovering—which requires only a couple of button presses—the controller can be tilted to adjust its orientation, with the trigger used to adjust speed. I basically point the onscreen cursor at where I want the drone to go, and it’ll go there. Point it toward a gap between the railings of a fence, and the Avata 2 will glide right through. It’s much easier than it has any right to be.

If I need to stop suddenly, I can tap the brake button and it’ll bring the drone back to a safe hover. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to crash, and I managed to bring the drone down once by steering it directly into the post of the aforementioned fence. It dropped about 8 feet onto the stones of a beach, but was fine to resume flying, without a visible mark on it. This thing is impeccably built, and while I don’t doubt repeated high-speed crashes will damage it eventually, it’s clearly designed to withstand some punishment.

But what of those mind-bending aerial stunts on YouTube? Sadly, you can’t really pull them off with the motion controller. The drawback to its user-friendly simplicity is that it doesn’t work in the same way as a twin-stick controller. Think of it as a controller with training wheels. If you stop flying—to dive for instance—it will eventually stop moving and hover in place. Clever, but limiting.

For those that want to graduate to trickier manual flight, DJI sells the $199 console-style Remote Controller 3 , which allows you to fly the drone in manual mode. Here, the training wheels are off and the slightest error can result in an embarrassing and potentially costly crash. You can also perform incredible tricks, if you know how.

For me, who's keen to return the Avata 2 sample back to DJI in one piece, the RC Motion 3 feels like enough for now. It’s allowed me to capture some wonderful footage using the Avata 2’s electronically stabilized camera, which records video at 4K/60 fps or 2.7K/120 fps. There's also the option to use a 10-bit D Log M color profile for more postproduction color grading too. The drone comes with 46 GB of built-in storage for videos and 12 MP photos, plus a microSD slot for those requiring more space.

My First FPV

Ultimately, the Avata 2 is the latest in a long line of DJI drones that makes it easy for amateurs to achieve great results. In this case, it makes FPV flying incredibly simple and intuitive, and its camera allows you to create some thrilling, smoothly cinematic sequences with very little effort.

There's also very little in the way of comparable products on the market, with most FPV drones being kits built by enthusiasts, rather than consumer-friendly designs. As a result, the main alternative to the Avata 2 is the original DJI Avata . And for those who own the first-generation model, I’d say, aside from the Goggles 3, which aren't retro-compatible, the improvements here don’t really warrant an upgrade.

But if you're new to the FPV game, I strongly advise you to choose the latest version. It is only $179 more, but there are improvements across the board, with enhanced flight performance, longer flight time, intelligent flight modes, and advanced safety features. If you're looking for a gateway to FPV fun, they don’t come any more accessible than the Avata 2.