While motorcycling in the wilds of Hawaii--and no doubt trampling various critters along his merry way--a guy named Sean (not me, I swear!) witnesses a vacationing district attorney being tortured and killed by the ruthless and smarmy gangster Edward Kim. Sean takes off on his motorcycle right away, making darn sure that the killers know he was there. Sean decides not to call the cops and just lay low for a spell. But it’s not long before the gangsters arrive at Sean’s and try to turn him into Swiss cheese with their guns. But that’s ok, because Sean’s life is saved by none other than Samuel L. Jackson! Yes, kids, the man, the legend himself is here! Aren’t you excited?! I sure am!
Anyway, Jackson--who’s coasting solely on his bad-ass reputation here--convinces Sean that it’s in his best interest to testify against Kim, and Sean, seeing the error of his ways, allows himself to be escorted to Los Angeles by Jackson in the first class section of a roomy airliner. A cranky Julianne Margulies plays a stewardess on board who’s on her One Last Flight, before she goes off to become a lawyer. And there’s also a rapper and his entourage (which consists of only two dudes--talk about a low budget movie), two little kids flying by themselves, and a woman with her baby. In other words, they’re all easy pickings, because what they don’t know is that there are (say it with me, now) Snakes On A Plane!
Thanks to an overbearing ad campaign, this tried to be one of the biggest hits of the year, but it crashed and burned instead. And rightfully so, because it’s very, very bad. Snakes On A Plane’s main problem is that it veers wildly from over the top comedy, to straight horror, to cheesy action movie mode. The movie doesn’t really know what it wants to be, and in an effort to try to please everybody, it ends up pleasing no one. The whole idea of bringing down a plane with snakes is really dumb, anyway. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, is that you can’t deliberately make a cult classic--cult status is bestowed on a film by the public, not the studio. And if Snakes On A Plane ever achieves any sort of cult status, it’ll be as the new Plan 9 From Outer Space.
--SF
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