I hated this movie. When I say hate, I'm not talking about a movie like Jack and Jill that has absolutely no redeeming value at all, but there's so much wrong with this movie it's one of those movies I just can't ever imagine ever seeing again.
Here's the biggest problem; it's a two and a half hour long public service announcement. For a movie called "Flight" there's very little to do with flying in this movie. It's all about this one pilot and his problems with coke and booze. For 150 minutes!
So much of this movie is just padding. The way we establish that Whip (Denzel Washington) is a drunken deadbeat father is in the first scene. So far, so good. The way they do it is of course a full on close up of his girlfriend's naked boobs and her bare butt prancing to the bathroom.
Whip's best friend/drug dealer (John Goodman) who looks like Jerry Garcia if someone performed a resurrection is the best character in the movie and he's really pointless. He's only in two scenes. 1) when he visits Whip in the hospital and 2) when Whip is drunk as a skunk and needs some coke to sober up.
Whip's girlfriend he meets after the planecrash, Nicole is completely useless in this movie as well. In the first act we see that she's a junkie prostitute and before we even know who she is, we watch her overdose on heroin.
Hostility and Spoilers. Abandon all hope ye who read further.
I can't do this anymore. I have to explain this because someone in Hollywood clearly hasn't gotten the memo. If I don't know anything about a character, if I don't know what they are doing in the story, and if I don't know their NAME, I'm not going to be emotionally invested in what happens to them. I didn't care when naked boob lady died because I was guessing that it even was naked boob lady. She looked so much more different with her hair tied up and, you know, clothes on. I call her naked boob lady because I don't know her NAME!
Also I don't really care that much about Nicole. Because I've already seen her overdose on heroin before I even learned her NAME or had a bloody clue what she was even doing in the movie!
Also we need to have a little talk about protagonists. If you're going to do a movie like this, it's okay to have a protagonist we don't like. I didn't like Whip. At all. That's not the problem. The problem is that he has to have some kind of redeeming quality. He doesn't. We want to root for the guy. We are supposed to not want to see this guy get in trouble. We want to see this guy get help despite all the times he refuses to get help. We want to see him get better and be a better father to his kid. But he shows no likeable characteristics! I wanted him to go to jail. He shouldn't be a pilot! The guy was drinking mid-flight! This isn't the story of a good and decent man overcome by his demons. This is a foul, no good, piece of crap trying to cover his ass through the whole movie only to dramatically have one saving moment. Yep. That's your climax. His heart grew three sizes and turned over a new leaf. And all the Whos down in Whoville love him. They sent his ass to jail for gross negligence even though the problem with the plane was clearly a mechanical failure.
It's 2 1/2 hours of an unlikeable douchebag self-destructing. Fun.
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