SNAKES ON A PLANE: silly fun

Imagine “Anaconda” meets “Airport 75” with Samuel L. Jackson and “ER’s” Julianna Marguiles replacing the cast of old time movie stars and you’ll have a good idea what to expect from SNAKES ON A PLANE.

This is a product that does exactly what it says on the tin - “it is what it is” says director David Ellis on the DVD commentary track. The story opens in Hawaii with surfer dude Sean Jones, played by Nathan Phillips, witnessing the murder of an LA based prosecutor by notorious gang boss Eddie Kim. Jackson is Neville Flynn, the FBI agent tasked with getting Jones safely back to Los Angeles aboard South Pacific Airways flight 121 so he can testify against Kim. But Kim has an ingenious plan to prevent that happening. He fills the hold of the jumbo jet with boxes of poisonous snakes. The boxes will open at thirty five thousand feet, filling the plane with angry snakes that will kill everyone on board, leaving the plane to crash into the Pacific. The only thing Kim hasn’t factored into his plan is Agent Flynn.

Even if you didn’t catch this movie at the cinema (and many didn’t) the plot may well sound familiar, and that’s because SNAKES ON A PLANE became an internet phenomenon which generated an enormous amount of media hype months before it ever hit the big screen.

The silly but simple concept hit a nerve with movie geeks, and spawned a myriad of websites dedicated to production gossip, parodies, tributes, and even suggestions for scenes and dialogue that should be included in the script. Rather than sending in the lawyers to close down all the unauthorised activity, the film’s producers recognised the value of this free, fan generated publicity and encouraged it, even reshooting certain scenes to incorporate some of the fans’ ideas. All this was picked up by the mainstream media and reported on extensively, so by the time of the film’s release in the summer of 2006 expectations were so high that they really had nowhere to go but down, and that’s exactly where they went. The film did just average box office business, and now it resides in the memory as a passing fad if – indeed - it resides there at all.

It’s not difficult to work out why the film fell below expectations. It wants to be a combination of airborne terror, horror, thrills and campy comedy, but lacks the imagination to make the mix work. The writers and director have filled the plane with the sort of stock characters that aficionados of mid air disaster movies have come to expect (single mom with baby, honeymooning couple, unaccompanied minors, old woman, stewardess making her final flight etc), but forgotten to give them anything interesting to do. It’s a sad commentary on the quality of contemporary pop culture that the only two passengers with any kind of depth to their character are a Paris Hilton-like airhead blonde with a miniature dog, and an egotistical hip hop star who might possibly be modelled on P.Diddy.

Ranking the odds of survival for each of the passengers is one of the fun aspects of watching this

film. Even before they’ve fastened their seatbelt it’s not too difficult to identify those likely to make it to the end of the film, and those who are shortly going to become snake food, but what would have made it more entertaining is to have done something a little different with them. Why not confound our expectations and feed the cute kid to the snakes while making the obnoxious businessman the only passenger who can fly the plane? And it would have been great to have included a cameo appearance from one of the stars of previous midair disaster movies - maybe Peter Graves from “Airplane!” or George Kennedy, the only actor to appear in all 4 “Airport” movies.

If it wasn’t a lack of imagination then perhaps the reason why these options weren’t explored is that they would have detracted from Samuel L.Jackson. This is his film and he’s not going to compete for attention with anyone or anything else, even the snakes. Jackson makes his passion for the project very clear on the DVD commentary track, describing it as “entertainment and movie making at its best!”, but that enthusiasm doesn’t translate into a particularly impressive performance. His kick-ass FBI Agent Flynn comes across as a watered down cartoon retread of John Shaft.

There’s also another way to look at this film, and it’s summed up by director David Ellis. He says that SNAKES ON A PLANE “never pretended to be anything but a great fun summer movie” and he’s right, at least about the fun part. This is not highbrow art house cinema; it’s ninety-nine minutes of silly, gory, violent and sometimes smutty nonsense that will make you laugh and make you jump.