Snakes on a Plane

After all the anticipation, that was certainly disappointing. The promise of Snakes on a Plane was that it was making an earnest commitment to an incredibly stupid premise, embodied in the minimalist title. From what I read, Samuel L. Jackson signed on to make a bad movie without the self-consciousness of parody, but the suits got a hold of it, hence the astroturf promotional campaign and the flaw of the final product: it's too good. SoaP ends up taking what's been done before, and done better, and just throws it up on the screen with really cartoonish CGI snakes, and this would be fine, except that it plays it safe and doesn't include the two ingredients that make schlock into cult films: risible incompetence and excess.

Everything is a little too polished, all the details of the plot ironed out, except for the one thing that needed to look good, the fake snakes. I didn't need an explanation for how they got the snakes to attack everybody, or to have the mechanism for their release established. We laugh at cheap-ass horror movies that strain our suspense of disbelief, like if we'd been asked to believe somebody piled venomous snakes into an overhead bin. All the characters are carefully introduced and fleshed out as real people over the course of a long introduction, which is kind of the antithesis of what I watched this movie for. The cast seems to know it too, as they all sleepwalk through the film. I expected horror and exploitation, not bland drama with snakes... this was more like an episode of MacGyver, where you know all the characters with names have to make it to the end (and they all do).

The other thing that was missing was excess, just gratuitous nudity, death, sex, horror, and nudity. There's a brief section when the snakes first emerge that starts to fulfill this, but then the whole thing settles down for a long denouement in which everybody's more or less safe up in first class. And the video game freak cheerfully saves the day by landing a 747. Samuel Jackson's big signature line feels forced, no doubt because it had to be included in re-shoots after it became a huge running joke on the internet... the fans knew he should be running around yelling like a crazy man, but the film only begrudgingly gave us two seconds of it. There are early nods to the sex and violence this type of film is supposed to be about, the mile high clubbers and the guy taking a piss who all get attacked in the bathroom, but really only nameless minor characters who appear for those two minutes. All the beautiful people stay buttoned down, and are filmed in a very restrained way as they maintain a chaste distance in their polite conversations, lest they say something provocative and appear too flirtatious. What's sad is when the big rap star starts his routine chatting up the rich white girl, or the flight attendant loosens her top button to go chat up the FBI surfer witness, we all know not a single one of the four of them's going to get any satisfaction out of it.

It started out with some promise, but this film is just so conservative, never daring to even let the characters enjoy themselves, much less the audience. It's Neocon America, You can kill all the throw-away characters you want, as long as the good guys win and the good girls don't have any fun.