The Flight of the Phoenix Review
by Harvey S. Karten (harveycritic AT cs DOT com)December 16th, 2004
FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX
Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
20th Century Fox
Grade: B+
Directed by: John Moore
Written by: Scott Frank, Edward Burns, based on Lukas Heller's screenplay and Elleston Trevor's novel
Cast: Dennis Quaid, Giovanni Ribisi, Tyrese Gibson, Miranda Otto, Hugh Laurie
Screened at: MGM, NYC, 12/13/04
What's your worst airline story–aside from your complaints about what passes for food? I thought I was a goner when a Continental flight from Newark heading for Mexico could not retract its wheels. Seems we were barely able to support lift-off at a glacial pace, heading south of the border for what seemed like a top speed of 50 mph. My biggest scare, though, was in anticipating a flight across the Andes. We were meeting a Fokker, one of those World War 2-appearing two engine jobs. If you're in trouble in that part of South America, there's no landing space. Obviously we got from Santiago to Lima safe and sound.
Until "Flight of the Phoenix" came along, I figured that if you're going to crash-land anywhere, the safest place would be in a large area that's the very opposite of the Peruvian Andes, and that would be a desert. After all, you can't hit any buildings, you can't wind up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean like the poor couple in "Open Water." But what if the desert were in a strange area over which flights were far between, rescue missions out of the question, and hostile smugglers as determined to shoot you as to give you the time of day? This dilemma is faced in John Moore's remarke of the 1965 "The Flight of the Phoenix," which starred Jimmy Stewart as the hapless captain of a doomed aircraft. With Dennis Quaid taking the Stewart role and an amusingly eccentric Giovanni Ribisi as the only guy who could save the frightened passengers, John Moore's "Flight of the Phoenix" is a tension-filled drama about motley bunch from various corner of the world who must get together, chuck their differences, and rise like the titular Phoenix from the ashes of a doomed aircraft.
In the starring role, Dennis Quaid plays the part of Captain Frank Towns, whose unhappy role is to fly his two-engine C-119 propeller-driven aircraft for an oil company to pick up workers whose hunt for oil has proven fruitless. The newly laid-off people that Towns encounters in Mongolia's Gobi Desert (actually filmed in Namibia, where the desert sands stretch for scores of miles without a telephone line in sight) include the boss of the oil-drilling crew, Kelly (Miranda Otto, a household name since her role the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy); the corporate downsizer Ian (Hugh Laurie), who orders the shutdown of the rig; Tyrese (A.J.), the co-pilot, respectful to the end toward his first in command; Jeremy (Kirk Jones), a one- eyed guitarist; Sammi (Jacob Vargas), a Hispanic cook from New York's Lower East Side; and Rady (Kevork Malikyan, a Saudi citizen with the unit's best knowledge of the desert. Elliott (Giovanni Ribisi) is the show-stealer as a mysterious, dyed- blond eccentric character who boards the airline at the last minute, picked up not because of any job on the oil rig but because he is on sabbatical from his job designing model airplanes and is touring the world.
What "Flight of the Phoenix" examines is: what happens when people are stripped of everything they possess, adrift as a crew of people whom the corporation considers zeros and losers, seeming not to care about searching for a lost plane which has failed to arrive at its destination in Beijing? With radio contact lost and no possibility of human rescue, the stranded travelers rely on Elliott, who claims to know how to put the wrecked plane together sufficiently for its flight to Beijing, even if the passengers have to literally wing-it. A major power struggle breaks out when Captain Towns, putting his status above chances for rescue, insists that he will not take orders from Elliott. Elliott, however, oddball to the extent that he probably has few if any friends, plans to bring not only Towns but rest of the survivors to their knees in paying homage to him. Elliott begins the journey as the odd-man-out, the guy nobody knows and the fellow who is considered unlikely to be of any use, but ends up the only man who can offer hope to this utterly forlorn pot-pourri.
Dennis Quaid may not be James Stewart, who headed the cast in Robert Aldrich's 1965 version of the story–which takes place not in the Gobi but in the Sahara–but he is convincing as a leader who fights as hard to keep his alpha status as to save his skin. Like the '65 "Flight," just about everyone in the group of misfits is unlikeable–selfish, obnoxious, nasty–and as the plot moves forward we wonder who is going to emerge the hero, and who will be killed by a group of Asian gun smugglers, who'd as likely shoot the entire group as extend a friendly hand to people from a vastly different culture. Ultimately, then, this "Flight" begins as a thriller, opening with one of the scariest plane crashes ever filmed, but casts its mark as a character study of people from various subcultures who must work together and get their stuff together before the water and the peaches give out or the smugglers get their comeuppance.
Rated PG-13. 110 minutes. © 2004 by Harvey Karten
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