Flight (2012)

Flight (R) - Review

"Take one down, pass it around..."

Robert Zemeckis (Cast Away) returns to from his forray into 3D drudgery with Flight, a character driven film about a Pilot who saves a plane full of passengers despite his dangerous drinking and drug problems.

Denzel Washington (Training Day) stars as Whip Whitaker, a man surviving at the bottom of a barrel whose drinking has taken over his life, his relationships and his career.  When a plane goes down due to mechanical error (in a spectacularly palm sweating fashion) on a routine flight from Florida to his native Georgia, Whitaker somehow recovers by inverting the plane and gliding to a hard stop in a open field.  Upon waking, he discovers himself a hero having saved the lives of almost the entire plane due to his skill but also under authoritative scrutiny due to a damning blood test drawn while he was unconscious.  The rest of the movie is a scramble to cover the tracks of his substance abuse, to shift blame and cajole his friends into supporting his clean status, to allow the Union to whitewash the affair for him while he continues to get as drunk as possible to ease the tension.

The acting is great with notable appearances by Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda) as a Whip's Criminal Attorney and John Goodman (Big Lebowski) as his subcultural sunshine drug dealer.  The pace and story of the movie are just right, Denzel's crumbling life is told with sincerity, without overt preachiness but realistically, the degree that alcohol is ruining is life unfolds slowly.  A moment in the stairwell at a hospital with a enigmatic cancer patient and a lovely heroin patient is remarkably poignant and memorable, the crash itself is shiver inducing, and above all the sublimely correct final act is well done.  Put your head between your knees and assume the crash position, its going to be a bumpy ride.

8 Cocopuffs out of 10 (GREAT)