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being an aspiring critic, i normally just say "eh, that's their opinion," but this dude was completely out of his element, and even incorrect in parts. this review reeks of it being written by a 60+ year old man:
(DISCLAIMER: DO NOT BASE YOUR DECISION ON GOING TO SEE SoaP ON THIS REVIEW)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/18/AR2006081800905.html
'Snakes': Slithering Toward Mediocrity
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 19, 2006; Page C01
Silly me, I thought it was called " Snacks on a Plane." It was going to be a documentary about those delightful little unopenable steel-mesh bags they give you on flights; you know, the ones containing seven desiccated peanuts, two Rice Chex, a shoestring pretzel and 19 sunflower seeds, all sand-blasted with industrial-strength ceramic glaze salt. The trick is to serve it exactly 35 minutes before or 35 minutes after giving you your regulation three ounces of Diet Coke with melted ice.
But no, it turns out it's called " Snakes on a Plane," though the irony is that it really is about snacks on a plane. The snacks would be the crew and passengers of Pacific Flight 121, who are Vienna cocktail sausages for about 300 creepy, oozy, squiggly, slithery reptiles. (Question: Why would it be easier to smuggle 300 snakes aboard an airliner than one bomb?) They bite nearly everyone in all the predictable places that a 13-year-old would find "funny."
The movie's highest level of artistic expression was the ingenious Internet campaign that catapulted it to cultural phenom months before it even opened. The thing itself turns out to be pretty much an afterthought, cheesy and not very well worked out. Once the basic situation is defined -- people here, snakes there, snakes want to come in here, no place to run, no place to land and we're 40,000 feet over an ocean -- the movie just reiterates itself time and time again. Meanwhile, it traffics, most unfortunately, in the broadest sort of cultural cliche. Worse, the cast, with the exception of recognizable middle-tier star Samuel L. Jackson and third-tier names Julianna Margulies and Kenan Thompson, is mostly nondescript. Really, you'll see more attractive and talented people in the food court of any mall than most of the non-star people in this film.
The setup is marginally clever. In Hawaii, a young surfer dude (journeyman Nathan Phillips) cycling in the jungle comes across an unpleasant scene when he witnesses a nasty drug dealer execute (by baseball bat -- ugh!) a crusading prosecutor. Unfortunately, the gang sees him, identifies him and puts him on its hit list. In short enough time he signs up for FBI witness protection under the care of bull-goose macho agent No. 1, Neville Flynn (Jackson). Flynn's job is to get him back to the mainland to testify. Flynn, his partner and the dude commandeer the first class compartment of a jumbo redeye to LAX.
Somehow, the drug dealer's agents manage to smuggle the 300 scaly tubes of fanged death aboard, possibly by hiring Tom Cruise's "Mission: Impossible" team. The whole thing is handled rather blurrily, but at a certain moment in the flight, the snakes are mechanically jostled from their slumber, spilled to the floor of the cargo compartment, fired up by lady-snake perfume sprayed in the air as part of the plot, and they start dropping out of the light sockets, crawling up the toilet (you know what that one's going to bite) and onto the flight deck.
As Shakespeare said, alarums and excursions follow. Most of the violence is merely glimpsed, and dabs of gore are fleeting. On the other hand, director David Ellis (his "Cellular" wasn't bad and was a lot more original than this) has a kind of addiction to the boo! mechanism, as snakes continually pop like jacks-in-the-box out of various compartments on the plane. Most appear to be animated somewhat crudely, although now and then there's a second-unit cut-away to what appears to be a real beasty doing that deal where it forms an "S" and seems to turn its bottom scales into tank treads and moves really fast.
Unfortunately, Ellis and the screenwriters have almost no imagination for human beings, much less believable verbal exchanges. Thus, the thing plays like a bargain-basement parody of the original "Airport," with a thin cross section of humanity running around as snakenip. Most of the female flight attendants are pretty and plucky, the male cabin crew is stupid and plucky. The gay flight attendant is effeminate but plucky. The FBI agent is bald but plucky, the surfer-dude-witness is cute but plucky. As for head flight attendant Margulies: She's just plucky. According to horror film conventions, beautiful, brainless hippies, fat, used-up middle-aged women, and snarky British millionaires who complain about being bumped out of first class cannot, will not and do not survive the ordeal.
No performance can be said to stand out, but it's difficult to stand out when you're the guy bitten in the neck and the guy next to you is bitten on the nose and the woman on the other side of you is bitten in the eye and all three of you are screaming madly and doing the hokeypokey until you cease to move yourselves about.
And, in any event, the snakes have all the lines.
Snakes on a Plane (106 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for intense scenes of terror and violence, some gore, profanity and some nudity.
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