Snakes on a Plane (2006)

[foxtrot_sierra]

No movie could live up to the camp “good-bad” build-up of “Snakes on a Plane.”  The movie’s wind-up is pretty bad; not “good-bad,” “so-bad-it’s-funny,” or even offensively bad, but simply the blandest, least interesting way to establish what needs to be established.  There are a few howlers along the way, to be sure, but for the most part, the set-up of the witness being escorted on a plane full of types is slow and wooden.  Then a funny thing happens in the second half-once we know the rules of the game and how these phony snakes work, the movie works decently as an adventure in which the passengers do battle with their slithering intruders.  From here on out, the movie is a good crowded-theater movie, and probably powerless on home video.  As the FBI agent, Samuel L. Jackson does well by playing everything straight and often loud, getting in some great swear words and hitting it off with the ladies by smiling and saying nothing.  He got my biggest laugh, inexplicably, by answering “Is it hot in here?” with “I haven’t noticed, but I’m from Tennessee.”  Although many critics claim “SoaP” would be critic-proof, the final movie proves to be anything but:  not only is a “reversed engineered” movie not very good (the studio gave in to various and sundry internet demands on how the movie should go), it also hasn’t done more than a couple good weeks at the box office.

2006, 105 min, R.  Directed by David R. Ellis, starring Samuel L. Jackson, Nathan Phillips, and Juliana Marguiles.