Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) likes a drink. And the ladies. And cocaine. And flying. So after an evening of the first three, he puts on his uniform and heads off for his day job of doing the forth.
Surprisingly, when everything goes wrong halfway into his passenger flight it’s not the booze or the drugs that are to blame but a mechanical fault – in fact, it could even be that the booze and the drugs loosen him up enough to attempt the daredevil flying he does to somehow prevent the plane from diving into the ground.
Instead, he pulls off a landing that has him hailed as a hero – but even heroes get investigated after a crash. The big problem with Flight is that director Robert Zemeckis doesn't seem able to control himself when it comes to putting together the pieces of this film.
Most of it is a perfectly decent small-scale character study of a man in denial about his drinking problem, and Washington does an excellent job of hinting at the characters weaknesses when he's in public before breaking out the quality drunk acting in private.
But Zemeckis opens the film with an astoundingly suspenseful twenty minutes or so of plane crash action, which sets the bar so high – and in a totally different direction from the rest of the film – that everything else can't help but feel like a let-down.
Add in a way over-the-top performance from John Goodman as Whip’s drug dealer – he's only in two scenes but he's a walking cartoon who throws things off balances in yet another way – plus a badly misjudged "I've learnt my lesson" coda and this ends up as a perfectly serviceable and at times insightful look at addiction buried under a string of misjudgements.
3.5 out of 5
Flight Australian release: 31st January, 2013 Official Site:Flight Cast: Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Don Cheadle, Melissa Leo Director: Robert Zemeckis
