At least at press time, Non-Stop stands as the second of three collaborations between Liam Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra; 2011’s Unknown and 2015’s Run All Night are the others. The streak running through this thriller triumvirate? Vanilla flavoring.
On a New York flight of 150 passengers bound for London, air marshal Bill Marks (Neeson) temporarily has to shelve his ongoing love affair with booze — oh, sweet booze! — when, halfway over the Atlantic Ocean, he receives a series of threatening text messages on his supposedly secured-line phone. They aren’t your everyday threatening texts, either, like “OMG ur so fat” or “imma block u on instagram” or “saw yr mom on tinder #gonnahitdat!” Nope, these digi-missives are of the stop-the-presses, sound-the-alarms, batten-down-the-hatches variety: from a terrorist! Maybe even — gulp! — terrorists, plural!
With each superimposed onscreen in a gimmick that quickly grows old from sheer overuse, the texts warn that if a million bucks per passenger — that’s $150 million total for those of you not paying attention and/or with appalling multiplication skills — isn’t wired to an account within 20 minutes … well, the passenger count goes down to 149. Repeat for every 20 minutes thereafter. Making things worse, said account is in Bill’s name, meaning that whoever is pulling the scheme’s strings has framed the marshal for hijacking.
Simple enough, right? As a federal agent barks over the phone to our — hic! — sexagenarian hero, “We will not negotiate with terrorists,” and they think that’s you, Billy Boy! Neeson has played this part so often, with only slight variations, since his career resurgence as Aging Badass with 2008’s Taken; the difference here is that Taken took viewers somewhere.
For Non-Stop’s first half, that vanilla tastes delicious enough, with Collet-Serra unapologetically building a high-stakes, high-altitude, high-gloss, high-concept whodunit — and whosdoingit — set in the unfriendly skies. Once the tone veers into action territory, vanilla’s generic nature seeps to the forefront, leaving viewers wishing more resided on the surface: chocolate sauce, gummy worms, butter brickle — hell, even granola! By then, the film loses all its fuel, drifting into a scenario so tired and seen-it-all-before, Non-Stop could be retitled Airport 2014.
While the studio-funded flick no doubt gave the great Julianne Moore (Boogie Nights) a paycheck a few zeroes above her usual indie gigs, the raise wasn’t accompanied by an opportunity to do anything but be Bill’s eventual arm dressing. Doomed to similar standing-’round status are The Strain’s Corey Stoll and, as the nervous-Nellie flight attendants, Michelle Dockery (TV’s Downton Abbey) and Lupita Nyong’o (then a newly minted Oscar winner for 12 Years a Slave). I won’t name the one supporting character who is given a hunk of meat to chew, because his casting proves detrimental — not because he’s a bad actor (because he isn’t), but because if you’re familiar with his filmography, the minute he appears is the minute you’ll think, “Oh, he did it.” And he did. —Rod Lott
Buy it at Amazon.
Eyes of a Stranger, as if you needed telling, is no Rear Window. Nor is it supposed to be. Ken Wiederhorn, director of the Nazi-zombie chiller Shock Waves (clips of which can be seen on the tubes of a couple of characters), knows he’s making a B-level psycho-thriller — no more, no less — and thus makes Eyes watchable. For all its genericness, it’s almost comfort food in how utterly every-step-predictable it plays, right down to each victim’s teasing display of nudity and other elements watered-down from the era’s slashers.
