NON-STOP

Reviewed by Patrick Gibbs

GRADE: D

Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, Michelle Dockery, Linus Roche, Lupita Nyong'o

Screenplay by Chris Roach and Ryan Engle

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

It's time Hollywood had an intervention for Liam Neeson. First off, let me say that I while I do not think Taken was a terrific film, I found it entertaining  enough, and Neeson gave the film a star presence that really sold it. I admit I even had fun with the  ridiculous sequel, which was thoroughly idiotic but fast paced and fun. The Grey was a drama  disguised as an action film that delivered as both, and I genuinely LOVED The A-Team.  But 20 years ago right now, Neeson was the immortal star of one of the greatest achievements  ever to grace celluloid. Now he's getting large salaries to lend a sense of prestige and credibility  to action thrillers. Okay, that's not the worst thing in the world. But with Unkown, Battleship, Clash  and Wrath of The Titans,  and now this latest embarrassment,  the movies keep plunging downward so  drastically in quality to the point that he's genuinely becoming a staple of bad films. It's not a matter of  getting back to the point when he was Oskar Schindler: I'd settle for back when he was Qui-Gon Jinn. In Non-Stop, Neeson plays Federal Air Marshall Bill Marks, who is stuck sitting on an overnight international flight from New York to London, which is he is none too happy about because he doesn't like his job. In fact, he hates flying. But he was fired from the N.Y.P.D. and became a drunk when his daughter died. He needed a gig, and having seen Denzel Washington mix alcohol with airplanes so successfully in Flight, it seemed like the thing to do.    During the flight, Marks receives a series of threatening text messages, stating that a passenger will be killed every 20 minutes unless $150 million is transferred into a secret bank account. When the bank account is discovered to be under Marks' name and a bomb is found aboard the plane, Marks is branded as a hijacker.  This is all very by the numbers, but there is potential for entertainment here. But the clumsy plotting and stock characters don't help, and corny dialogue and shoddy fight sequences that play like Jason Bourne Meets The Three Stooges all combine to make sure that this movie never gets off the ground. What's worse, when we finally learn who is doing this and why, the reasoning is not only too preposterous believe,  it's borderline offensive. It's impossible to escape the fact that no one could plan a hijacking that was this dependent on coincidences and sheer dumb luck and have is possibly succeed in any form. In the end, director Jaume Collet-Serra desperately wants to be another Hitchcock, but simply doesn't have the skill or brains for it. The closest thing to a saving grace is the interplay between Neeson and Julianne Moore as a passenger on the plane, but even then her character's cornball back story destroys any sense of reality to the relationship. Non-Stop is rated PG-13 for violence, profanity, mild vulgarity, smoking and alcohol use.