Review: ‘Non-Stop’

Here we go. Another Liam Neeson action movie. If anyone told me ten years ago that Liam Neeson would soon be one of the biggest and most bankable action stars of the 2000s and 2010s, I woulda told you…that would be an interesting possibility. Though not likely. Sure he was okay in Star Wars. But as a stand alone action star? Naaaaaah.

Jump Cut!

Present day. Interior. Movie Theater. A movie unfolds on the screen to a packed audience. Liam Neeson is the first person onscreen. The audience is enraptured. The end.

That’s how it SEEMS anyway, considering how some people react to the different things good old Liam does throughout this one particular film, as well as how people turned out to see both “Taken” and “Taken 2” and will be thrilled for “Taken 3” when it comes out soon enough. He’s starred in movies left and right and he’s added some gravitas to bigger productions; he’s been Zeus, he trained both Obi Wan Kenobi and Batman, he fought off hungry wolves, he was the voice of Aslan (which makes him the voice of God in Chronicles of Narnia speak), he is Liam Damn Neeson.

And in “Non-Stop,” Liam Neeson plays a US Air Marshal who finds himself in a helluva predicament when someone starts playing a game of cat and mouse with him on a packed flight on its was to London. An unseen person, communicating through Liam’s secured Federal network threatens to kill someone every 20 minutes unless he gets $150 million in ransom money. Liam (because why bother differentiating all of his similar action movie characters with names anyway) has to try to find out who this person is, all the while also being a depressed alcoholic  struggling to keep the trust of his colleagues on the airplane in even the best of circumstances, and of course there is a twisty, turny plot with lots of surprises that I didn’t see coming at all and which helped make this a very entertaining movie.

EXCEPT!!! (record scratching sound) – I actually DID know all the little twists and turns of this plot because of the damned commercials and trailers, which manage to give away everything about this movie up until the last five minutes. For realsies. So what COULD have been a fun time with a very Hitchcockian whodunit bottle episode murder mystery type of movie, the life got sucked out of this thing because the marketing department didn’t know when to hold back. And there were commercials and trailers for this movie everywhere, in front of every single movie coming out for the last many, many months, on television over and over, so annoying.

And then when the one actor in the movie shows up early on, I quickly knew he was the “bad guy” cause he’s the one actor NOT shown in any of the trailers or commercials. They show us everyone else looking suspicious, but they never even hinted this one up and coming actor was in this film, so immediately I figured he was behind the whole thing and well guess who the fuck was right?

So if you HAVE NOT seen the commercials and trailers, you actually might enjoy this thing, because they do have a fun time trying to switch things up here and there and there is indeed a couple of little twists that were diabolical and clever, but no matter what, if you see it all coming or if you don’t, we all know the fun of this kind of movie is all in the journey, the figuring out of the puzzle, the drama and suspense of not knowing who it may or may not be, and like with 99% of movies set up like this, the final reveal is a let down, because no one cares about looking at a completed puzzle, people want to put the puzzle together (or live vicariously through the hero of the movie solving the puzzle, in this case, which person is behind terrorizing poor old Liam).

Overall it is kind of a dopey movie, with lots of little details that don’t make sense when you think about them for too long, but given the nature of this movie and how it was made, I won’t go into any of those deets here, because you may want to catch up on old Liam on an Airplane on the Redbox or something like that, and I won’t blame you because you know what? I’m behind the whole Liam Neeson is a bad ass action star thing, too, and its not like he’s making pure garbage. Shit, his movies make money, which keeps him from starring in “Maximum Conviction III: The Convictioning” with John Cena anytime soon, and he’s done things with little twists to them, little bits of edge, some personality, whatever you want to call it, so he can keep making movies like this and I’ll at least check them out.