Flight of the Phoenix is at first a promising action thriller, but after three quarters of an hour, it sinks down into a pit of clichés surrounded by a wall of boredom.
This is a remake of the 1965 film that was based off of the 1964 novel written by Elleston Trevor.
Dennis Quaid stars as Frank Towns, an airplane pilot who arrives in the Gobi Desert, Mongolia, to pick up the workers of an oil rig that turns out unproductive. On their flight to Beijing, the aircraft gets caught in a sandstorm and Towns is forced to make a crash landing, saving most of the crew but pretty much destroying the plane. What follows is a struggle for survival, but an eccentric passenger Elliot (Giovanni Ribisi), who claims to be an airplane engineer, wants to use the material out of the old plane to build a new one. With hostile nomadic people watching them from the sand dunes, the passengers and pilots work together to get the plane finish and to return home.
What Flight of the Phoenix tries to be is an action survival story, with the peoples surviving out in the harsh wilds of the Gobi, the hostile nomads, and against each other. Instead, the film never gains enough momentum, and after a while, it gets rather boring and unexciting.
The film does feature an ensemble cast: Dennis Quaid, Giovanni Ribisi, Tyrese Gibson, Miranda Otto and Hugh Laurie.
The film was most criticized for being a nearly exact replica of the 1965 version that starred Jimmy Stewart. I have not yet to see the 1965 version, so I therefore cannot criticize the movie from that point of view.
I never really did expect Flight of the Phoenix to be that good of a movie, but I at least expected it to be fun, exciting and entertaining. It wasn’t any of those, and not that well crafted as a survival story either.
C-
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