Snakes on a Plane (2006)

Ah, the internet.  The wonderful things it has brought us, and the horrors that it has wrought. 

Famously, Snakes on a Plane came about from a contest to come up with the worst pitches for a movie ever.  Somehow the idea got gained traction online, and Samuel L. Jackson even signed up for this hybrid of Under Siege and a low-budget Jaws ripoff, with the agreement that they would keep the name from the original draft. 

The result?  Some fanfare, a good performance by Jackson as always, but just as bad as the pitch would have made it sound.

Sean Jones (Nathan Phillips) is on vacation in Hawaii when he witnesses crime kingpin Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson) murder a businessman.  He thinks he got away without being recognized, but Kim sends goons to kill him.  Luckily, FBI agent Neville Flynn (Jackson) also knows that Jones was a witness, and shows up in time to protect him.  Reluctant at first, Jones agrees to return to the mainland with Flynn and testify against Kim.

In a desperate bid to prevent Jones from testifying, Kim hatches a plot to lace the leis given to outgoing passengers with pheromones that drive snakes into a mating and killing frenzy.  Of course, in order for this to have any effect, he also has to make sure that there are cages full of poisonous snakes smuggled on board the plane, with timers set to release them while it is in flight.

At first things go as he plans, as the snakes inadvertently mess with wiring and then begin a full-scale attack upon the passengers and the crew.  However, with the help of various passengers and resourceful flight attendant Claire Miller (Julianna Margulies), Flynn tries to make sure the flight stays in the air and everyone survives to land in Los Angeles so they can bring Kim to justice.  On the ground, it is also a race against time to identify the snakes and prepare antivenom to administer when the plane lands.

In truth, these nature-gone-wild movies can sometimes be pretty good.  Snakes, however, have really never had a good movie about them.  Sssss! probably came closest, but usually we're stuck with stuff like Anaconda or the Asylum movies.  Disappointingly, this felt like of the latter, the only thing setting it aside from Asylum is the fact that it has actors that didn't need to get a weekend pass from rehab. 

Think that's harsh?  The CGI in this is horrible.  There are some real snakes used, but any time a CGI snake is used it is quite obvious, since none of their models act anything remotely snakelike.  The special effects crew barely took time to try to get them to blend in with their environment.  It is truly on a level of the animation from The Mummy 2. 

The other problem is that the makers know why this eventually got to be made, and it was simply because of the internet and people wanting to hear Samuel L. Jackson say that famous line about getting the snakes off the plane.  That is it.  A few shots of nudity and extra violence were thrown in since this was already going to get an R rating for that line, and in the end we have a movie that is practically mugging at the camera the whole time.

A shame since, if it hadn't been so self-referential and knew what it wanted to do, it could have worked the same way Volcano did in sending up these types of movies.  Jackson is great as always, but we get some memorable side characters in germophobic rapper Three G's (Flex Alexander) and his friend Big Leroy (Keith Dallas), the latter who steps in to save the day toward the end.  Also, the lecherous pilot turns out to be pretty interesting as well. 

In the end it turns out to be just barely this side of something you would see on SyFy.  It's a case of being careful what you wish for.  What you might get is a half-assed movie capped off by a music video featuring some of the worst rap-rock of the 2000s.

Snakes on a Plane (2006)
Time: 105 minutes
Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Julianna Margulies, Nathan Phillips
Director: David R. Ellis


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props w
Read more

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in childbirth, was born
Read more