Flightplan
In "Flightplan," a muscular new thriller, Jodie Foster plays Kyle Pratt, a widowed propulsion engineer who disrupts the calm on a jumbo jet bound for New York City from Berlin after her daughter goes missing. None of the crew can confirm the girl was ever on board (her name doesn't show up on the manifest), and the captain (Sean Bean) implies that Kyle's consumption of sleeping pills and antidepressants might be affecting her judgment: Is she hallucinating this?
People, please: Her husband just fell off a roof; that's him in the high-tech casket down in the luggage hold. Would she really make this up? Post-traumatic stress is possible; Greta Scacchi even appears as a shrink for an in-flight therapy session. But we saw the little girl; though I must admit she was such a whiny thing I didn't really miss her once she was gone.
With an increasingly annoyed air marshal (Peter Sarsgaard) as her minder, Kyle demands the attendants check every nook of the plane, whose design she knows intimately. She rushes the cockpit. She accuses a couple of Arabs of taking her daughter and causes all manner of calamity from parts of the plane I never knew existed. (Do they all have shiny crawlspaces that resemble a set from "2001: A Space Odyssey"?)
Halfway into the movie, the basket case mother becomes a shameless terrorist, and, incredibly, you go right along with it. Aside from Sigourney Weaver, Jodie Foster is the only other woman in the history of movies who can play a part like this -- widow, mother, victim, depressed scientist, righteous, angry, agile, scared, distraught, intimidating, much stronger than you, and springing into action with a man's name -- and have you root for her. When Foster pulls off her black long-sleeve T-shirt and reveals the gray short-sleeve one underneath it, the audience is primed to explode with excitement. We know the movie will kick up to a more intense level.
But "Flightplan," which was written by Billy Ray and Peter A. Dowling and directed solidly by Robert Schwentke, doesn't have its heroine's conviction. It'd be better if it had. When a group of Arabs gets swept into Kyle's suspicions, the movie's potential audacity is nerve-racking: Will it really go there? Yet because "Flightplan" operates in a post-9/11 world of air safety, it also remains acutely sensitive to offense.
So while Kyle freely says she couldn't care less about political correctness, the movie does her caring for her. She singles the Arabs out because she thinks she saw them peeking into her Berlin apartment the night before. One of the accused Arabs, Ahmed (Assaf Cohen), says it's all ridiculous, and he is rightly miffed: the movie dares you to think the worst.
In any case, the outcome is so prehistorically apolitical, it's tempting to think the reason Foster's character has a man's name is because Bruce Willis could have played the role two decades ago. But while it's all thoroughly illogical, so is my cellphone's calling plan, and I go along with that.
Ultimately what makes this picture fly is Foster, who's playing another character who turns jeopardy into vengeance as a rite of motherhood. The last film she carried was David Fincher's "Panic Room," which failed to live up to the formidability of its star. Foster doesn't work a lot (Fincher's movie was more than three years ago), so every film she stars in feels like an event: The camera in "Flightplan" devotedly swings around her whenever she stands up. Foster's infrequent appearances lend a sort of urgency to both her work and our response to it.
Her arrival now feels timely given the exasperation with the foot-dragging concerning the Gulf Coast hurricane victims. What we applaud in her character is a woman who refuses to accept "sit tight, ma'am" as an answer in a moment of crisis. When the movie's turmoil subsides, if she's no longer interested in airplanes, there might be a job open for her at FEMA.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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