The story told in "Flight of the Phoenix" is really basic. A rag-tag group of oil drillers are told to pack up and get the heck out of Dodge (in this case, Dodge is the Mongolian desert) because they can’t find any oil. They complain, get pissed, but the company has a point. No oil = no job. That’s a fairly simple equation.
Pilots Frank Towns (Dennis Quaid) and AJ (Tyrese Gibson) are sent to pick up the drillers. After a bit of tomfoolery where the audience gets to know a little bit about each of the characters, Towns makes the dumb decision to fly through a huge sandstorm. AJ tells him not to. The weird passenger (there’s always a weird one in movies involving planes) tells him the plane’s too heavy and won’t make it. Yet Towns proceeds anyway. When the plane crashes, no one seems to blame him for trying to fly through unsafe weather. No, he’s thanked for crashing it. Go figure.
After 10 minutes, they all pretty much decide no one is going to come get them. The weird guy (Giovanni Ribisi) claims to build planes for a living and says they can get their busted heap off the ground if they just perform major surgery on it. Of course, they have all the tools they need. It’s a movie, after all.
As if getting stuck in the Gobi Desert without much food, water, or hope of survival isn’t enough, there’s a marauding gang of black-clothed ninja-looking baddies just over the next sand dune. Of all the bad luck! After discovering these desert raiders have used one of their buddies as target practice, this group of smarties decides they must be friendly enough to approach for some water. I don’t know but I’m pretty sure if I was in their position, I’d leave well enough alone and hope the bad guys leave quickly.
So now they’ve got a plane to build, they’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest by disturbing the marauders, and they’re running out of water. Wondering how this will turn out? I’ll give you a hint. The movie’s called “Flight of the Phoenix” and the plane is named Phoenix. Complain to the studio if you think there’s a spoiler hidden in there somewhere.
Actually “Flight of the Phoenix” started off just fine. Quaid did a weird Bill Clinton impersonation, the plane crash was white-knuckle inducing fun, and some of the drillers were kind of interesting. But it quickly degenerated after the group crashed. With nothing to fill the time but bad dialogue and set-ups you can see coming a mile away, the movie “Flight of the Phoenix” crashed and burned after the first 40 minutes. How bad did it get? Let’s just say a music video broke out in the middle of the movie for no apparent reason. That, and the fact the script called for the timing of the return of the bad guys at the most improbable moment, made the movie’s eventual climax more ridiculous than thrill-inducing.
Quaid, Ribisi, Tyrese, Miranda Otto, Hugh Laurie, and the rest of the supporting cast do an admirable job of trying to pump a little life into the film. Unfortunately, this “Flight” is one they shouldn’t have booked to begin with.
I never watched the original 1965 “Flight of the Phoenix” with Jimmy Stewart and Sir Richard Attenborough, but now that I’ve seen this remake, I’d like to go back to the source material and see where this 2004 version screwed up. What I do know is that this “Flight of the Phoenix” loses its opening momentum and descends rapidly into a silly, ill-conceived mess of a movie. Don’t waste your time boarding this “Flight.”
GRADE: D+
"Flight of the Phoenix" was directed by John Moore and is rated PG-13 for some language, action and violence.
