Come on in, Denzel! Dry out!
If a critic’s first responsibility is to help the reader enjoy a particular work – and I’m not sure I agree, but I’ve heard that – with Flight that’s an easy one: stay for the first 20 minutes and then leave. You’ll get an awesome nude scene, Denzel ACTING, and a harrowing plane landing, and you’ll leave forever wondering what could have been. I promise, it’ll be better in your mind, for the same reason your teachers always used to tell you to read a book instead of watching TV. “Go on a FLIGHT, on the wings of your own IMAGINATION!”
If you do happen to stay, though, you’ll be treated to an extended infomercial for AA, an important after-school special about the dangers of alcoholism, a very special episode of the Denzel Show.
Flight is your basic example of a good premise in search of a movie. We open on Denzel, morning, in his hotel room full of empty Miller bottles, where he’s been up all night banging a preposterously proportioned, ludicrously hot flight attendant who has just woken up and is walking around stark naked, as hot babes are wont to do (as I know from my extensive research). Nadine Velazquez plays the flight attendant, and it would be impossible to overstate how fantastic her breasts are. They just sort of haunt the background for a while like chubby apparitions, all perky and ready to greet the day, while Denzel smokes a cig and argues with his ex-wife over the cell phone. He’s got family problems, you see, the poor guy. He takes a bump of coke to sober up and they hit the airplane.
