“My my Liam Neeson certainly has found a niche for himself. The misunderstood good guy with a checkered past who gets thrown into a hostile situation and relies on his history of bad assitude to save the world. Or something. As silly as it sounds, it actually kinda works for him. The powers that be have also figured out that these smaller scale action films work best in winter when the pickins are slim, as opposed to getting drowned out by the superheroes and Transformers of summer. Non-Stop adds to the list that already includes Taken, Taken 2, Unknown, and The Grey.
So this time, he’s a former cop now air marshall who travels the world he can’t emotionally connect to. While on an overnight overseas flight, he gets a message from within the plane threatening to kill passengers unless… The further details aren’t that important. It may all sound kinda cheesy, but it was (and I swore I was gonna stop using this phrase) a fun ride.
I enjoy solving the mystery, and appreciated the closed system of the airplan in which to solve it. Who’s involved? Who’s gonna die? Who’s the stunt casting red herring? I’ll admit I latched onto the wrong person, but if I had recognized a certain someone else earlier (an “”oh he looks familiar”” that I didn’t properly identify until it was too late), it may have changed my mind. The closed system also ups the suspense. No really, whatever’s happening is only happening here and here is the only place we can solve and stop it. There’s also so much tension involved in flying anyways (just the ordeal in general) that it also naturally builds up the suspense.
This film would have easily gotten overshadowed in the summer, but it provided a good escape in an otherwise weak winter. As long as you can overlook some of the cliches of the small scale action genre.
Non-Stop – \m/ \m/ \m/ \n