Immediately after watching this trailer for Jaume Collet-Serra’s action flick Non-Stop, my first reaction is to give it a trite comparative description, calling it “So-and-so on a plane” or something. But it actually looks like about seven different movies combined, and I don’t feel that listing each and every one will do anyone any good. That isn’t to say it looks bad, necessarily - I’m rather interested in almost any Liam Neeson film that comes out, and it appears to be shooting to give audiences some white knuckles. It just doesn’t look all that original, and it appears to give away the entire damned movie in less than two-and-a-half minutes.
Non-Stop is Neeson and Collet-Serra’s second film together, the first being 2011’s Unknown, and I’m wondering how much the two films have in common, given they both rely on a main character whose identity is mistaken by those around him.
Neeson plays Air Marshall Bill Marks, who is traveling on an overnight international flight, with Jen Summers (Julianne Moore) as his seatmate. As the narration in the trailer lets us know off the bat, he hates flying and along with all of the hassles that go with it. I’m guessing after this flight, he’s going to hate being quasi-hijacked while being on the receiving end of a bunch of texts. I don’t know about you guys, but I think I’m going to be completely taken out of the movie by the onscreen texting. It’s the same tactic they use on Netflix’s House of Cards, only that works better both because it’s a TV show and because Kevin Spacey’s character talks to the audience, so that fourth wall is already broken. Also, watching someone text in an action movie is about as non-thrilling as you can get.
The rest of what we see in the trailer, which comes to us courtesy of iTunes Movie Trailers, is certainly high-octane suspense. The film’s villain, whose identity is unknown, will kill a passenger every twenty minutes unless he (or she) gets $150 million sent to a particular bank account number. And so then the question becomes, “How does it happen?” And then we see a dead body. So this definitely isn’t a false threat (How boring would that have been?).
Things go flying off the rails as its revealed that bank account number belongs to Marks! Oh man! So then he becomes a suspect, and a lot of fast-paced paranoia and violence happens. Plus a bomb! Or at least a bomb’s timer. At some point we see the plane get a hole blown in its side and everything inside goes flying around. I mean seriously, we didn’t need to know anything mentioned in this paragraph. Sure, show a few things flying around in the plane, but don’t make it blatantly obvious what each and every one of the problems is.
Not sure I’ll be catching this one in theaters on February 28, 2014, but I’ll probably be waiting for it to hit Blu-ray later in the year. What did you guys think of the trailer?
