Film - Non-Stop (2014)

Liam Neeson Stares At Phones: The Movie

First off, I should probably say that you should only read this review in its entirety if you aren't bothered about spoilers - if you wish to remain unsullied, skip to the final paragraph and the score. In any case, Non-Stop concerns a Transatlantic flight to London, carrying US Air Marshall Bill Marks (Liam Neeson). Not long into the flight, he receives a text from an unknown person aboard the plane, asking for fifteen million dollars to be wired to a specific account, or someone on the plane will die every twenty minutes. With no idea who on the plane he can trust, and time rapidly running out, Marks is forced into a psychological battle with his tormentor, and the suspicious passengers and crew, but before long he realises his adversary has an even more sinister goal...

Staring at phones is, like, 95% of what he does.

Non-Stop marks the reunion of Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra and recently-credible action star Liam Neeson, after Unknown. Neeson is reliable as ever in his dry but solid performance as Marks, the Air Marshall who hates flying. By this stage in his career, we're familiar enough with his character types that for the majority of the film he can communicate with the other passengers with just a stern glance - including one fellow passenger who has been on the receiving end of a disapproving glare three times before the plane is even airborne. By this stage, though, that's all Neeson really is: a type. Not a man, so much as a rough-talking, roughhousing automaton that growls threats and leaves no stone unpunched in his quest to do... well, whatever it is this time. Naturally, of course, it turns out there's more to Marks than that, and his somewhat unnaturally-revealed past of ignoring his terminally ill daughter because he was too afraid to watch her die is the same kind of traumatic hardass-creating backstory we've seen a thousand times before, and this film has no new spins to add to it. Between Non-Stop, Taken, Clash of the Titans, Gangs of New York, Chloe and Battleship, I'm starting to think that Neeson's actual typecast role is 'terrible parent'.

"Hands up who thinks their character is underwritten?"

This is normally the part of the review where I talk about characters, but Non-Stop makes that rather difficult. Not because it's a suspense mystery thriller - because I am going to reveal who's behind it in this section, so again I warn you to skip to the last paragraph if you don't want to know - but because the plot does not feel the need to tell us anything about the characters other than the qualities they have which let them contribute to the plot: the head stewardess Nancy is helpful and well-meaning, so we know Marks trusts her to help out a little. Passenger Jen Summers is fussy and inquisitive, so she involves herself in Marks' intrigues in the grand tradition of nosy do-gooders. Captain McMillan is weary and confused, but supportive of Marks and is his only ally with actual authority to do anything, so of course has to be offed rather unceremoniously early on. 

Unfortunately, the film acquires its very talented cast and promptly does very little with them. I don’t watch Downton Abbey, but I know that third-billed Michelle Dockery has been nominated for three Emmys so probably deserved better than being wasted in the stewardess role of Nancy, which only lets her contribute to the plot by letting Neeson bounce ideas off her, and whose only personality trait seems to be 'jittery'. Fortunately for her but unfortunately for the film, she isn't the only talented performer given short shrift by the screenplay. Oscar-winning Hollywood darling Lupita Nyong'o (12 Years A Slave), who doesn't even receive poster billing, also does little other than demonstrate a reasonable Cockneyish accent on her very, very few lines and mainly serves to bolster the number of staff on the flight (Is just three stewardesses normal?) and give Dockery someone to talk to in the background of shot, and Scoot McNairy (Monsters, Argo) gets barely any time to do anything other than look a bit dorky and occasionally interested, which is rather a pity as he's actually the villain along with Nate Parker (Red Tails), and their main character traits - they're ex-military - also happens to be more or less their sole motivation. Parker is just helpful enough for his villainy to be a surprise but McNairy is virtually characterless and his unveiling as the bad guy carries all the impact of a blancmange cricket bat. In fact, there are several instances where they help Marks even though it actually hinders their plans to do so. I won't go so far as to say that the writer hadn't actually decided who the villains were until he got to their unmasking scene, but even the tiniest bit of foreshadowing can help the audience not feel cheated out of being allowed to participate in the deduction. Finishing off the characters who get to be a bit more than set-dressing, the ubiquitous Corey Stoll (Law & Order: LA) also appears, but is similarly underused as an NYPD officer who serves the time-honoured role as the passenger who's argumentative and obstructive for no readily explained reason before finally turning out to be 'not so bad after all' (TM). The excellent and oft-underrated Linus Roache (The Wings of The Dove, Law & Order) appears very briefly as the captain, but good luck spotting him in any of the promotional materials or remembering he was in it 5 minutes after the credits. Don't get me wrong: all the actors perform their roles very well, but then the parts are so shallowly-written that anyone above the level of Tommy Wiseau could autopilot through them blindfolded. 

Still doesn't look like Cate Blanchett.

The restricted setting also means that when a character isn't actually required by the script to be in the current scene, they either hover about in the background somehow restraining themselves from getting involved in the tremendously interesting main action, or they just completely vanish for large swathes of time: witness the scene in which the passengers get fed up with Marks' apparently-baseless hostility and violently mob him. Despite previous shots establishing them being in the cabin, neither Nancy nor Gwen (Nyong'o's character) nor any of the unnamed crewmembers also present lift so much as a protesting voice to help him for a good few minutes until the screenwriter remembers they're there once the whole issue is pretty much resolved. In some ways this is an unfortunate necessity of the plot, albeit one that could have been handled with rather more grace than is present. While in some ways Non-Stop emulates a Christie country-house murder mystery, the emphasis is on tension and maintaining pace rather than character, and thus the movie has to prevent us from knowing any character too well to eliminate them from our suspect list, and would probably be straining to give us that time even if it wished to. The director's intention was likely to pack the cast with recognisable, notable actors - but not superstars - in order to lessen the audience's ability to predict a character's role in the plot by the importance of the actor playing them. Consequently, it is really only the two headlining stars that are served well by the script, and whose characters' lives outside of the plane can even be said to exist, and one can hardly count Liam Neeson because he (solidly and reliably, it must be said), seems to be playing the same guy and doing the same things in everything he’s done recently – although he is a little more subdued here, and more frequently takes recourse to words and negotiation than Taken's Bryan Mills (two BM-initialed protagonists for Neeson? Coincidence?). This leaves us with Julianne Moore, playing a good-humoured and sarcastic but strong-willed woman, whose main motivation is a life-threatening heart condition that could make her keel over at any moment, giving her at least some reason to savour an opportunity to be involved in an exciting mid-air murder plot, though the condition is unfortunately mainly used to justify why she always wants a more picturesque window seat.

Considering how innocent the trailers seemed to be trying to make
Julianne Moore's character, perhaps the film's biggest twist is that she
isn't the villain. Just look at those glasses. Evil.

American Hollywood pictures often tend to go through phases of their villains, quite frequently based around whoever America was unhappy with at the time. The British had their turn - and even other nations' villains were often played by British actors, c.f. Alan Rickman and Jeremy Irons - as did the Russians for a long time during the Cold War, along with the Germans, and more recently Arabic jihadists and insurgent sleeper-cells, but there's one more group that get a large representation in such movies... other Americans! Namely, in this case, American extremists who don't think the US is xenophobic or jingoistic enough, and want to create some sort of scare to inspire the politicians to be more aggressive towards their foreign enemies, and when you're borrowing plot ideas from Die Hard 4.0 you know you've got problems. I realise that the plane has an American Air Marshall on it and has come from an American airport, but is it really demonstrating how unsafe American national security is if you hijack and blow up a British airline flight en route to London? To its credit, the film does have Marks point out that this plan just makes them look like colossal tools and no-one is going to consider them to have done anything remotely heroic at all, but frankly I won't be impressed with a film's originality until a villain listens to the hero saying that and replies "Bloody hell, you're right. I'm a moron. Here, let me just disarm the bomb and turn myself in. Dodged a bullet there, didn't we?".

Look at this picture for about six seconds. Congratulations, you
have now paid more attention to Lupita Nyong'o than the script!

Overall, despite my non-stop nitpicking (see what I did there?), this is a good film, or at least a decent one - I would probably rate it above Taken because there's more for the audience to think about than "who will he punch next?", but just slightly below Unknown, which used its characters and the actors who played them rather more adroitly, though was still a little more stingy with clues for the audience than I would have liked. Aside from the remarkably low bodycount - seriously, the action-heavy finale involves major damage to the plane and an emergency landing, and still no-one dies - there's little surprising here for a Neeson-led action film. The characters are limited and thinly-sketched, but well-performed by their actors, and the plot is indeed non-stop. And that is probably the root of the problem, really: the film has a talented cast, an intriguing plot, a good setting and some very effective twists, but none of these is ever used to its full potential for fear that doing so might cause a brief, unforgivable lull in proceedings. Make it 20-30 minutes longer, give some of the other characters a bit of backstory and more things to do, and slow down a little, and this could have been a kind of actionised, Neeson-esque Ten Little Indians. In fact, of the mere five deaths, three of them are villains anyway. Perhaps the film could have garnered a little more depth and impact by killing off one of Marks' more likable allies: the little girl used to demonstrate that Marks is not so harsh underneath it all; Nancy, the only non-essential member of the crew whose name we can actually remember; or Jen, whose heart condition dangling over her like the sword of Damocles is practically crying out to pop up and kill her at some dramatically appropriate moment. It seems odd to be demanding more deaths in a Neeson action movie, but the fact is the villains accomplish so little that the enormous amount of crap Marks is given by his superiors and the other passengers seems hardly justified by what he's been framed for. 

While I would certainly never call the final product bad, or even totally mediocre - it's an engaging enough 95 minutes - Non-Stop just seems to be trying to keep too many plates spinning at once, and hurries between them too quickly to check if they're actually stable or not. It wants Taken's Neeson-flavoured gritty violence and ruggedly indestructible main character; it wants Hitchcock's mounting suspense as the framed man searches for his tormentor; it wants Christie's colourful gallery of suspects and detective work as the bodies pile up. Non-Stop never actually drops these plates, but they're all a bit wobbly (and that third one is only a paper party plate to begin with) and unfortunately the film only manages to be slightly less than the sum of its parts.

6/10 - Not quite a Non-Starter