Starring: Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, Scoot McNairy, Michelle Dockery, Nate Parker Director: Jaume Collet-Serra

    Joel Silver makes his debut as a Universal producer in the thriller that reunites Liam Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra.

    A CONSTANT low boil of ridiculousness both mocks and sustains “Non-Stop,” a jerry-rigged terror-on-a-plane thriller with a premise so far-fetched as to create a degree of suspense over how the writers will wriggle out of the knot of their own making.

    Neither as gritty or cheesy as his “Taken” movies nor as deadly serious as “The Grey,” this reunion of Liam Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra (their 2011 thriller “Unknown” raked in US$130 million worldwide) no doubt deliberately recycles aspects of the “Taken” films by making the lead character a wild-card government lawman with a young daughter. In addition to that, Federal Air Marshal Bill Marks is an alcoholic and something of an emotional wreck but is still allowed to pack a pistol on a plane.

    Riding shotgun on this Aquabritish flight from New York to London, Marks takes the opportunity to enjoy business class and the company of chatty seatmate Jen (Julianne Moore) but is interrupted in short order by a series of text messages, evidently from someone on board, warning that a passenger will be killed unless Marks arranges for US$150 million to be deposited into a certain account within 20 minutes. Someone does duly expire, and another after that, and the trick card played by first-time screenwriters John W. Richardson, Chris Roach and Ryan Engle is that the accumulating deaths point the finger of guilt directly at Marks, who’s supposedly on board to protect the passengers from any such culprit.

    With the clock ticking away, Marks, with the reluctant help of a flight attendant (Michelle Dockery) and Moore’s well-traveled professional, urgently tries to profile the passengers to narrow down his list of suspects: There’s the surly bald man, the obvious Muslim, an unfriendly black guy, a weirdo with glasses and a few more. Whoever it is, he knows something about Marks and definitely knows how to yank his chain.

    Although he was a cop for 25 years, Marks doesn’t exactly fit the ideal profile for an air marshal; he hates flying, is so panicky during takeoff that he wraps a good-luck ribbon around his hand and sneaks smokes in the bathroom (he knows how to block the alarm sensor). The pilots don’t seem to entirely trust him and, after he pummels the first suspect to death (he sort of deserves it), you suspect he doesn’t know his own strength and can’t control himself. How he then manages to prevent anyone else from noticing the body is just one of the many inconvenient issues Collet-Serra nimbly deals with by ignoring it.

    As the implausibilities continue to accumulate, you feel the strain the screenwriters must have felt in trying to come up with the periodic action the format demands while keeping the villainous texter’s identity a secret. As he continues to receive messages from someone on board but fails to deduce who’s sending them, Marks moves passengers around the cabin, gets very rough with some of them and ignores the seat belt rule through most of the flight. If nothing else, the film offers a convincing case for banning cellphone use during flights.

    The most interesting development is the eventual mutiny of the passengers against their alleged protector. Television has begun reporting that the flight has been hijacked by none other than its air marshal, who’s tarred, feathered and convicted in the air while he’s trying to deal with the bomb he’s found on board. Meanwhile, two military jets are flying alongside with orders to down the plane if it descends as Marks insists it must.

    The finale is comparable in nature to the great plane crash sequence in Robert Zemeckis’ “Flight,” but is not nearly as nerve-rackingly convincing. Given that so many of the 150 people on board come under suspicion at some point, the eventual unmasking of the villain, or villains, is no more or less surprising than if it had been anyone else. But the rationale for the dastardly plot is hokey and thin, hardly worthy of the great lengths pursued it pull it off.

    The movie is now being screened in Shenzhen.

    (SD-Agencies)