Samuel L Jackson Month - Mini Review: Snakes on a Plane

Well this is a movie featuring well snakes… on a plane… Yeah, this joke’s redundant.

This is the movie which explains why I have a counter of the number of motherf*cks stated in an episode. Including the song bit in the end credits, it’s uttered 5 times in this movie, bringing the total count to 14.

So what’s the story? Well it starts with… gratuitous fan service. Yeah, the first minute of so is shots of bikini-clad women on the beach, none of them have anything to do with anything, just saying. But the actual plot. Sean Jones witness gangster Eddie Kim be a complete moron and do his own dirty work in a public place in the broad daylight. You have henchmen for a reason.

Wanting to eliminate a witness, he sends his men to kill him, like he should have done with the prosecutor and they wouldn’t be in this mess. Anyway, that fails thanks to the timely (seriously, he arrives at the exact moment the henchmen do) arrival of Agent Neil Flynn (Samuel L Jackson) who knew Sean was a witness because there’s a can of Red Bull at the scene with his fingerprints. I am just going to let that sink in… That makes no motherf*cking sense!

Anyway, despite the FBI setting up a decoy, they plane is found by Kim and he decides the best way to finish the job is to unleash a bunch of poisonous snakes onto the plane. So now it’s the Sean, Flynn and a bunch of disposable characters against an army of poisonous snakes to regain control of the plane.

I supposed I should list off the redshirts. We have woman with tiny dog, hypochondriac celebrity and his two bodyguards, couple people obsessed with sex and smoking, husband afraid of flying, flight attendant who could’ve taken retirement a month ago, pilot with sexist tendencies, disposable agent, children in a plane on their own, corporate douchebag, slightly camp flight attendant, girl who knows something about olive oil, man who gives his penis a name, flight attendant who serves as Flynn’s love interest and other pilot. Oh and several disposable characters who don’t get named or established before they’re killed.

If you can guess which ones survive off that list, have a cookie.

Anyway, this is not a movie to take too seriously, we have a scene of a snake eating a man whole and him being literally contained within the snake, we also have the idea that playing a flight simulator on a video game is in any away equitable to flying an actual plane. You could argue this is parody, hence the very large number of disposable characters and the very over the top nature of it all.

The biggest problem, aside from the numerous plot-holes, it takes itself too seriously, maybe this is part of the joke but if it is I didn’t get it, but then I’ve stated before that I am not the biggest fan of horror movies.

What does work though? The characters that aren’t completely disposable or deliberately unlikable are actually pretty interesting, Sean is a reasonably young man in way over his head but once the situation presented itself he did want to help and even did so, coming up with actually a pretty clever idea to prevent the snakes coming into first class. We are supposed to hope he survives so he can stop the villain whose dumbassery lead to this plot. And to their credit they do that pretty well.

Samuel L Jackson is the star and absolutely the best thing about this movie. He’s a badass, he’s cool under pressure, he’s armed with a taser, then a gun, then a knife and another gun and he even volunteers to try and land the plane

And of course we have this line

“Enough is enough! I’ve had it with these motherf*cking snakes on this motherf*cking plane” we have an internet meme!

It’s just the suddenness of it too, it comes almost completely out of no-where.

This is actually an entertaining movie, I’m not sure whether it’s satire, if it is it wasn’t especially funny (there's definitely a tongue in cheek nature to it though) but I enjoyed Jackson’s performance enough to make me enjoy it

Rating 60/100

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Images/clips used in this review are from Snakes on a Plane, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Avengers Assemble (The Avengers) and belong to their respective owners. All images in this review are subject to fair use