| Current music: | Eric Clapton - Change The World |
| Entry tags: | film |
Kick Asp
The people who made Snakes on a Plane should be stripped of their SAG memberships, their director's chairs, and every business card in their Rolodexes that are remotely related to Hollywood. The movie has perhaps the campiest title of any film in the past four decades, has relied almost solely on Internet hype as marketing, and capitalizes on the public's glee at hearing Samuel L. Jackson scream profanities. Without a doubt, Snakes is the single dumbest idea for a movie that has made it through to production in the last five years. It's barely even a movie; at best, it's a bunch of calculated beats of horror and action thrown into a paper-thin plot. And yet, for all the same reasons, it's awesome.
At this point in the review, it is customary to give a plot summary, but Snakes on a Plane is essentially as advertised: there's snakes on a plane. Also on the plane is Agent Flynn (Jackson), an FBI agent charged with transporting a key witness (Nathan Phillips) from Hawaii to Los Angeles to testify against a dangerous Japanese mobster. Unfortunately for the movie, the mobster disappears from the screen midway through the second act, left only to be remembered as a mentioned threat and the man who organizes the placement of snakes on the plane. Did I mention that, by the way? That there's snakes on the plane? Because there are, and it's important that you know that.
In watching Snakes, you realize that you get what you paid for: ridiculously clichéd characters (a flight attendant, played by Julianna Margulies, who's a day away from leaving the profession for law school; a rapper and his posse; a pair of oversexed newlyweds; Mr. Nervous Flier and his soothing wife...they're all there), laughable dialogue, and cheap thrills that make you laugh more than jump in fear. In a movie that marketed itself as a serious horror flick, this might be a problem, but Snakes seems more like a remarkably self-aware satire of the genre. Sure, it goes for the same scares as all the other horror movies, but when you have an entire audience on the edge of its collective seat, waiting to hear Jackson say the line that made us all fall in love with the hype, you aren't taking yourself seriously. Thank goodness.
The biggest challenge for Snakes was to live up to all the excitement that was built up over so many months of the blogosphere's love fest with it, and, believe it or not, it does just that. Snakes will keep its venomous bite on most of the cult following that anticipated its release and, because it's such a fun film to watch, wrap some new fans as well.
Rating: * * * 1/2 of 5
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
sjuhawk31) wrote,
