★★★★☆
Four Stars
Flight is a truly universal film. It’s a film that deals with two problems that rip thousands of families apart every year: alcoholism, and the guilt that comes from crashing an airliner under the influence of Class A narcotics.
At the heart of the film is Denzel Washington as Captain Whip Whittaker, a pilot who takes more miniatures from the trolley than a hen party on the way to Magaluf. He then operates the plane, which, in a devastatingly tense opening act, crashes into a field. It sounds like a hard-hitting opening, except for the fact that, rather than being hung out to dry for being pissed, Denzel gets a gold star and is held up as a hero.
The film then becomes an exploration of rampant alcoholism and drug use, and though it can’t match the tone or sheer balls-in-hand terror of that opening (Robert Zemeckis’ finest live action moment in years, drawing on the slightly wimpier plane crash in Cast Away) the film does manage to be affecting, mainly because two-time Academy Award winner Denzel Washington is just so fucking good at acting. The fact that he manages to never slip into villainy, nor make us sympathise too much with his predicament, is testament to how well earned his reputation is. He’s going to lose to Daniel Day-Lewis at the Oscars next Sunday, but it’s reassuring to know that he still has the chops to carry a high-profile drama on his own.
It should be mentioned that there are some other actors involved. Kelly Reilly (who, in real life, is English and not an alcoholic) plays a love interest who meets Denzel in the hospital whilst he’s recovering from his little plane crash. She’s good, although the character never quite feels fleshed out enough and is a bit too inexplicably moralistic. Flight also has John Goodman and Don Cheadle, playing a drug dealer (a fat, middle-aged, white drug dealer?!) and a lawyer (a young, handsome black lawyer?!) respectively. The roles are not quite as fun or subversive as they could be, but Goodman in particular seems to be enjoying teaming up with Zemeckis – even if Cheadle seems to be enjoying his role about as much as an amateur colonoscopy.
The film, overall, is an extremely fun drama, which might seem a little pejorative but isn’t really. This isn’t half as heavy as Zero Dark Thirty, or a thousandth as weighty as Amour, but it’s also a lot more fun than watching waterboarding or an old woman slowly dying. Definitely worth watching, if only to remind yourself that you’ll never be half as awesome as Denzel Washington.
