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by Willie Waffle
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Snakes
On A Plane
I
don’t know if snakes have a booty, but I know Samuel L.
Jackson kicks some in this campy classic!
I even thought I saw some Homeland Security guys in
the crowd taking
notes, just in case.
Jackson
plays FBI Agent Neville Flynn – part of the team trying to
prosecute evil
mobster Eddie Kim (featuring Byron Lawson screaming each of his lines
with his
best Samuel L. Jackson impression).
While in Hawaii,
Kim kills the prosecutor on the case, an illegal act witnessed by Sean
(Nathan
Phillips). Now,
Flynn needs to bring
Sean back to Los
Angeles
without anyone finding out. Of
course,
Eddie Kim and his henchmen find out which plane they are flying back to
Los
Angeles, and, to kill
Sean and anyone else on board, they spray all of the leis with
pheromones to
drive animals crazy and place a whole lotta SNAKES ON A PLANE!!!
Who
will live? Who
will die? How will
Samuel L. Jackson
save the day?
All of the months of waiting, blogging and
anticipating pay
off in one glorious moment when Flynn just can’t take it
anymore, rises up, and
announces to everyone on board, “I am sick of these mother
@#$%@!# snakes on
this mother $%^&@# plane!”
More than
that, director David Ellis has made the ultimate campy classic that
skewers
each cliché and makes you laugh throughout the entire film
without getting too
stupid and over the top. It’s
a premise
so absurd, it is awesome.
Writers John Heffernan and Sebastian
Gutierrez create the
exact kind of stereotypical characters and ridiculous situations you
would
expect to find on the flight and in a traditional B-movie (which this
certainly
is) including the stewardess on HER LAST FLIGHT (Julianna Marguiles),
the stuck
up rich girl (Rachel Blanchard) with her tiny lapdog (who looks
suspiciously
like a snake’s favorite dinner), a mother (Elsa Pataky) with
her new born baby,
two little kids flying alone, a passenger afraid to fly and much more. Each one lives up to their
comic potential as
you witness the histrionics that break out as the snakes make their way
through
the plane and attack passengers. Then,
they deliver cheesy dialogue that fits right in and makes us cheer and
laugh in
all of the right spots.
However, the true genius in the movie
comes from Ellis as he
delivers a taught, fast paced film with classic death scenes and snake
attacks. Some
attacks shock you because
you never see them coming (I jumped out of my seat twice!), while Ellis
draws
out the pain with others as we anticipate every tense moment, and, via
an
inspired and absolutely brilliant idea, we get to see THE
SNAKE’S POINT OF
VIEW! He fires up
the ominous music,
shows us what the snake is eyeing, and lets the audience’s
imagination go wild
as he takes us to the height of expectation!
Samuel L. Jackson is another reason Snakes
on a Plane is so good.
Without Jackson, the king of cool, guiding
us through the
flight, Snakes
on a Plane would be a joke without the laughs. It’s his
trademark intensity and hilarious, disbelieving
exclamations that channel what the audience is feeling at each step of
the
way. We laugh with
him, not at him, and Jackson gives
us a figurative
wink and a smile as each situation gets more outrageous. He delivers a virtuoso
performance in a
masterpiece.
I know there has been a great deal of
controversy over New
Line’s decision not to show this movie to critics as they
traditionally have
with movies that don't have the buzz and advertising budget of
something like Snakes
on a Plane, or as they do with Oscar contenders
like each installment of the Lord of
the Rings Trilogy
(they even treated a bunch of us here in DC to a fancy lunch before the
screening, so we would be inclined to start Lord of
the Rings:Return of the
King’s successful Oscar campaign with a Best
Picture award from our Washington,
DC Area Film Critics Association).
Sadly, by not trusting in their product, and
choosing to display a bit
of pettiness towards critics like me, they have shown themselves to be
a
paranoid, greedy company, and they could have made more money if they
let more
people spread the word about how entertaining Snakes
on a Plane truly is.
Thankfully, the movie lives up to every expectation,
and more.
Parents should be aware the film
has nudity, some people
doing drugs, a sex scene and some gruesome snake attacks.
It’s rated R, and rightfully so.
4 Waffles (Out Of 4)
Copyright
2006 - WaffleMovies.com
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