"I don't know who you are, but if you don't stop killing passengers, I will find you, and I will kill you."
The Lowdown: Non-Stop is The Liam Neeson Experience™ with a Hitchcockian twist. While it isn’t exactly Taken (2008) meets Flightplan (2005), one gets a similar vibe from the film. There is a semi-ingenious mystery wrapped up in Non-Stop’s plot, and while far from plausible, it’s certainly less preposterous than Unknown (2011). Still, as far as pure popcorn entertainment goes, one need not look further than a Liam Neeson film. He’s been in some of the best action-thrillers in the last few years (except for Battleship, I mean, what the heck was that all about), and Non-Stop is one of the better ones.1. The Plot: Bill Marks (Liam Neeson) is a U.S. Air Marshall with a troubled past and a drinking problem (of course) who boards a non-stop flight from New York to London. On the plane, he begins to receive anonymous text messages demanding a $150 million transfer to a private account, the catch being that if his demands are not met, a person on the plane will be killed every 20 minutes. Soon enough, people begin dying, and thus begins a search to find the terrorist, who is believed to be a passenger. Who amongst the disaster-movie array of passengers could it be? Could it be the quirky woman sitting next to Bill? Could it be the pilot? Could it be the flight attendant? Could it be the Muslim guy? Could it be the grouchy NYPD cop? Could it be the ghetto black guy with an attitude? Could it be the little girl who is on her first flight ever? What a mystery!
2. The Characters: A good portion of Non-Stop’s success is because of Liam Neeson’s on-screen charisma. We have seen this Liam Neeson before in most every film since Taken, which marked Neeson’s rebirth as a badass action hero. His character, Bill Marks, is grouchy and disheveled and a drinker because, you know, every action movie protagonist is like this. However, Liam Neeson isn’t the archetypal action hero; his characters can fight and glower with the best of them, but there is also a personality, a human charm attached to his characters that makes them more relatable. It almost puts Liam Neeson in his own class of action hero. With that being said, even if Liam Neeson is playing the same character here as he did in Taken, it still works better than if some stoic, big-muscled, one-liner-delivering tough guy played Bill Marks. For the supporting characters, the filmmakers went with a quality cast. For example, Julianne Moore (The Kids Are All Right, The Big Lebowski) is Jen Summers, a passenger who sits next to Bill and becomes embroiled in the search for the terrorist. There’s also Michelle Dockery (Golden Globe nominated for Downton Abbey) and Lupita Nyong’o (Oscar nominated for 12 Years a Slave) who both portray flight attendants. Their performances are adequate and their presence adds to the surprisingly diverse cast of potential suspects, but their characters are largely ornamental and don’t do a whole lot in the film. Like I said before, Non-Stop is The Liam Neeson Experience™ on a plane, but it’s nice to see that he isn’t the only good actor in the film.
On another note, who knew that airlines still had attractive flight attendants?
3. “Hitchcockian”: Hitchcock once said, “There is a distinct difference between 'suspense' and 'surprise', and yet many pictures continually confuse the two.” In a nutshell, the difference is all about the careful control of what the audience knows and what the characters in the film know, rather than what is shown or revealed on screen. The example Hitchcock gives is of a bomb under a table. He explains that if the bomb goes off without either the audience or the characters sitting at the table knowing, then it is surprise. However, if the audience knows that there is a bomb under the table, but the characters at the table don’t, then it is suspense. Of course, pulling suspense off is much easier said than done, but if executed well, it makes for great thrills in a film. So why am I talking about Hitchcock in a review of Non-Stop? It has “Hitchcockian” elements that are pulled off quite well, which is much more than can be said for many other action films. Bill Marks and we, the audience, are the only ones who know of the terrorist plot, and indeed, the best scenes in the film are the ones of Marks searching the plane for clues and answers while trying not to arouse suspicion. The ticking-clock element also adds to the suspense by reinforcing one of the film’s biggest mysteries: how does someone kill another person on a crowded plane and get away with it? That premise alone is worth at least half of the ticket price. Of course, there’s even the trope of making every character in the film a potential suspect, even Marks himself. How do we know that he isn’t the terrorist?
How do we know he isn't hallucinating those text messages?
The film that Non-Stop will inevitably be compared to is Flightplan, the excellent 2005 thriller starring Jodie Foster. That film also took place almost entirely on an airplane and had perplexing and fascinating plot: how does a little girl get abducted on an airplane without anyone on the plane noticing? Was she even there? The premise invites the audience to ask questions and formulate in their minds some kind of solution; the mystery is far too mysterious to not think about. This kind of audience participation is a response to the known and unknown elements in the film, and it is a staple of so many of Alfred Hitchcock’s films. Non-Stop and other Hitchcockian thrillers generate a similar audience involvement. What derails some of the suspense in Non-Stop is when the plot begins to unravel, becoming preposterous and threatening to ruin the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Action sequences are intense, but also ridiculous. However, these quibbles don’t ruin the film because it is, after all, billed as an action film that people came to see as a form of escapist entertainment. It wasn’t really meant to be a Hitchcockian thriller. The Hitchcockian elements are present mostly in the first half of the film, and I enjoyed this clever twist on the action genre.The Bottom Line: Non-Stop is everything one expects from a Liam Neeson film nowadays. This isn’t Flight (2012). This isn’t a film with any kind of message or agenda to push. This isn’t even really a film that requires any real thinking. It’s just pure escapist entertainment, but with an element of suspense and intrigue missing from so many other big-budget action flicks. I quite enjoyed the mystery of the texting terrorist in Non-Stop, and I’m sure most would. It’s a shame that it derails a bit later in the film, but that’s all right because the rest of the film features Liam Neeson being a badass. Really, isn’t that what we all came to see?
Non-Stopis property of Universal Pictures, StudioCanal, and Silver Pictures. This review was written by me.
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