Editor’s Note: Freeline Media critic Mike Fried thinks the producers and directors of some really awful movies can be a real snake in the grass; but when it comes to snakes on a plane, that’s a different matter! Read on!
By MIKE FRIED
SNAKES ON A PLANE
3/5
Crime lord Eddie Kim kills a federal prosecutor, but unfortunately a dumb schmuck, Sean Jones, witnesses it. Enter FBI agent Neville Flynn, who is escorting Jones as a material witness from Hawaii back to the mainland. Kim arranged for a time-release crate full of venomous snakes to be placed on the plane. Flynn commandeers first class much to the chagrin of the people who are now forced to sit on coach. And the snakes attack in new and inventive ways.
There’s something special about a movie that knows it will not be taken seriously, down to the point where ideas created by fans on the internet were used in the movie, leading to five days of reshoots — which is why there’s the line — “I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!” — which was voted as the #55 of “The 100 Greatest Movie Lines” by Premiere in 2007.
So it has that going for it, which is nice.
Am I here to tell you that this is a great movie? Not a chance in hell.
But I am here to tell you that this a Fun movie with a capital “F”.
And what works is that the writers and the producers know this flick is a disaster film that invoke all sorts of airplane movie tropes, including the rich jerk, the wealthy young woman who is attracted to the rich rapper who has two bodyguards (one of whom is a whiz at Microsoft Flight Simulator) to the young couple who have sex in the bathroom, to the sick passenger sneezing a lot on the plane, upsetting the germaphobes, to people who take their shoes off, to the flight attendant on her final flight before going to law school to the snakes shorting out the power on the plane.
The film production used both real and CGI snakes for the film. Obviously the poisonous snakes were CGI, but a funny thing happened on the way to making the movie. The production team found out that the real snakes didn’t move fast enough so they had to use CGI to speed them up.
And as dumb as this movie is, the film is a hoot. Improbability is dumped upon improbability. First the avionics shuts down and then the pilot suffers a fatal heart attack and then … more and more and more. But it doesn’t matter — it is a park your brain at the door movie and you’re supposed to just have fun. I saw this in the theater with my two sons and we were howling — and that’s the type of reaction the filmmakers are going for.
And despite the movie having a cheesy B-movie feel to it, it wasn’t a cheap movie to make. It was budgeted at $33 million and Samuel L Jackson’s paycheck was a full sixth of that.
But the rest of the film is expertly done. Production Designer Jaymes Hinkle created a realistically looking plane interior and in conjunction with the special effects team, put it in a set of pneumatically controlled gimbals which allowed the set to shake more than Elvis and in many instances threw the actors to the ground. The extras on the recently released 4k disc show that this is a lot more than a z-movie thrown together on a shoestring budget — like the low budget movie Snakes on a Train that was released three days before this to capitalize on it.
Besides Jackson, the cast has Julianna Margulies as the flight attendant who wants to be a lawyer, Gerald Plunkett as the obnoxious rich guy, Kenan Thompson as the rapper’s bodyguard, Bobby Cannavale as the LA-based FBI agent, Todd Louiso as a snake expert and wisecracking David Koechner as the co-pilot whose line “Any one of those slimy little pieces of shit can trip a circuit or a relay or a hydraulic and this bird goes down faster than a Thai hooker” brought down the house. And it looks like everyone had a blast making this movie.
People didn’t even believe Samuel L. Jackson signed on to the film, but he did without even reading the script because of the title. When New Line Cinema tried to change the title to Pacific Flight 121, Jackson threatened to quit. The rest is history.
In fact, Jackson actually said “No movie shall triumph over Snakes on a Plane. Unless I happen to feel like making a movie called More Motherfucking Snakes on More Motherfucking Planes.” With a high body count — including the best Python related death – this movie is a hoot.
If you like action pictures and have not seen this, I urge you to see it.
Sometimes, fun is all you need!
3/5
Fun Fact: The TV bowdlerization to “I have had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday-to-Friday plane!” might very well beat out the Big Lebowski’s TV version of “This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps!”
Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Contact Mike at moviemike3@gmail.com
