Flight - Review

Starring: Denzel Washington / Don Cheadle
Writer: John Gatins
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Runtime: 138 minutes

• Washington and cast excellent
• Hair raising crash sequence
• Insult to airline professionals

I'm not quite sure which would be worse: watching Flight before getting on an airplane, or before you go for drinks with a couple of friends.

Flight is a movie about drug and alcohol abuse, with a heavy emphasis on the latter. It's a story about how alcohol can alienate you from your friends and family, and how it can destroy your professional life.

Or can it?

It's a tough movie to pin down thematically. It does a great job of walking the tightrope between drama and melodrama, but I'm not sure about the moral it teaches. It is a modern day Lost Weekend for the jet set, which may intrigue you, or may make you yawn, i.e., how many times do we have to be shown that drinking alcohol all day is bad for you?

The film opens with Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) lying in a hotel bed with a naked, extraordinarily beautiful woman. He smacks the usual "the movie is starting" alarm clock. As the woman gets herself ready, Whip ends up on the phone with an angry ex-wife, then proceeds to get ready for work by downing some booze and doing a line or two of cocaine.

Using alcohol and narcotics before going to work is generally not a good thing, especially if, like Whip, you are an airline pilot who has a flight in two hours. His bed mate is an airline flight attendant, but she has no problem with Whip using drugs before heading to the airport with him.

Though Whip is high on coke and booze, his aviator shades help cover the pupils, and his long-time-addict brain helps cover the substance abuse. He boards the aircraft and treats it like just another day, though today he has a new co-pilot flying with him. Also on board the aircraft is another flight attendant named Margaret. They have evidently known each other for a long time and they seem very friendly.

After a rough take off, the flight is going along smoothly. Then bang.

The plane goes into a vertical dive, and the co-pilot has no control. There is yelling from a lot of people, but not from Whip. He is the picture of calmness.

In these scenes, Washington reminded me of The Right Stuff. In that book, Chuck Yeager was described as the guy who started the pilot's habit of sounding like Mr. Smooth. Even while hurtling towards the Earth in a deadly spin as a test pilot, Yeager would speak as if giving directions to the hardware store: Tail spin....Trying A....A didn't work....Trying B...B didn't work...Still spinning...Trying C...

Nothing rattled Yeager, and apparently his cool, slow drawl is the inspiration for every pilot's voice we hear today.

In Flight, while the plane is going down, Whip is Yeager incarnate. Smooth, talented and fearless. Even with all of the crap pumping through his veins, he can do no wrong.

I don't think I'm spoiling the movie by saying that Whip saves the day on that plane. He makes a miraculous landing and saves a lot of lives. The story is really about what comes after the crash landing. Whip is hailed as a hero, and every network news anchor wants to interview him, but there's a problem: after an airline accident, all crew must receive a blood test. Guess what Whip's test shows?

The remainder of the movie is a cat and mouse game between Whip and the NTSB, Whip and his friends, and Whip and himself. Every addict is a liar, and Whip is no different. Frustration will build in you as the lies grow deeper, and as Whip continues to destroy himself and others with these lies. Still, the lying feels - oddly enough - honest. It's the way that addicts behave. They will lie until they reach rock bottom.

As I said above, it's not like you haven't seen this material before. While watching the film, I rattled off a number of movies in my head that cover the drunk-person-in-crisis theme. They tend to be depressing and didactic movies that I wouldn't want to revisit. Flight is a little different in that is has a great cast, and Denzel Washington can carry any movie across the finish line.

One thing about this movie that bothers me, however, is how readily people accept his addiction, and try to cover for him when their own reputations or lives are at stake. The hot flight attendant who watches him do a line of coke, the older flight attendant who apparently knows he partied all night, the co-pilot who thinks he smells gin on Whip's breath, the lawyer and union rep who let him do some coke to calm him down before a hearing.

There's a cynical and comedic streak to the movie that is frightening. If I was in the airline profession, I would not be a fan of this film and in fact would feel the need to speak out against what it implies: that pilots can still make great landings when drunk, and that their colleagues will cover for them. Unless that's all true, which is almost too disturbing to consider.

Those thoughts aside, the movie is well done and worth seeing.

Photos: Rotten Tomatoes

American Gangster - Review

Director: Ridley Scott
Writer: Steven Zaillian
Starring: Russell Crowe/Denzel Washington
Runtime: 2 hr 37 minutes

American Gangster could have been called New American Gangster. Denzel Washington stars as the title character, Frank Lucas, a real-life heavy that controlled the New York heroin scene in the '70s. As the film tells us, Lucas was black, in a time before blacks were regarded as sophisticated criminals. The mantle of Crime Lord in 1970s New York went to the Italians, while blacks were considered petty crooks. Lucas changed that.

It's a dubious honor. John Gotti (life), Michael Corleone (film), Bugsy Segal (life and film), they are all legendary figures. What separates them from the regular losers is the memory of their lifestyles and the amount of dead bodies they managed to stack up. Joseph Stalin, history's most successful gangster, said that one death is a tragedy, while a million is a statistic. Crime Lords are cut from Stalin's cloth, and they follow the same rule: a thug that shoots someone is a murderer. A thug that executes dozens of people and pollutes a city with drugs is a lord, a crime figure that has a career.

Lucas was a thug. There is no denying that. He shot people, burned them with gasoline, and executed them on the street. So a thug, yes, but a smart one, which makes his career worth filming. At the start of his career, he was no better than any hustler on the street. As he progressed, he took over the NY drug trade by cutting out the middle man. Rather than buying heroin from domestic suppliers, he flew himself to Bangkok and went to the source. Using US servicemen in Vietnam, Lucas smuggled 100% pure heroin into the United States. Then he cut it up, downgrading its quality somewhat, but still keeping its purity higher than any other dealer's in the city. Because he wasn't using any middlemen, Lucas could afford to the sell his product for less than his opponents could sell theirs. Better heroin, and at a cheaper price? Gold mine.

Ridley Scott directing
The film doesn't glorify Lucas. Steve Zaillian wrote the script and kept it on target: the story of a thug that hits it big. Though Lucas is sometimes seen in fancy clothes and lives in a nice house, we are never allowed to forget what he is doing and who he is: a drug dealer. Director Ridley Scott shows flashes of people using the drugs, getting high, falling over, looking stupid. At other times, he shows flashes of people scratching their arms and dying for their fix.

I was glad the film didn't glorify the pusher, as some crime stories do. Heroin inflicts massive anguish upon a person and a community. The heroin pusher is the scourge of the inner city. Denzel Washington, while likable in parts, plays the role well. Lucas is affable, charming, smart...and a thug.

Russell Crowe is Detective Richie Roberts. He's a clean cop who doesn't take money, and the other cops distrust him for it. In one scene, he has the chance to pocket close to a million dollars from a crook's car. Though he knows he will be ridiculed and hated by fellow detectives, he turns the money in to the evidence room.

Roberts gets on to Lucas after seeing him hobnobbing with various crime lords at a boxing match. Already curious about the "Blue Magic" heroin that is making the rounds in NY and Jersey, Roberts begins investigating Lucas and develops a theory that Lucas is the mastermind of the drug ring.

His fellow policemen are skeptical and hostile. They don't believe that any black man could be a crime boss in New York, and they don't trust a cop that doesn't take bribes. If this seems odd, you should revisit Serpico, starring Al Pacino. It's another film about the systemic police corruption in New York during the 70s. Forty years ago, you would have had a hard time finding a cop in New York City that either wasn't on the take or didn't look the other way.

The film is a tad long, as Roberts develops his case against Lucas, and Lucas goes about his business of killing and dealing. As a period piece, it stands up pretty well. The cars and sets are well used, and you will be reminded of what a pain in the ass it was to find a pay phone every time you had something important to tell someone. Cell phones have made drug dealing and police work a lot easier than it was in the old days.

The Vietnam War is used very well as a backdrop, and it is appropriate. We catch newscasters on the TV in the corner of a room, telling us that the war is going badly, then worse, then worse, then the fall of Saigon, so forth. All of this is very meaningful to Lucas: if the Americans leave Saigon, his pipeline of pure heroin is going to go down the toilet. How he gets over this hurdle is as insipid as it is clever. But, as with a lot of clever plans, you have to be careful with them. In the end, this final ruse is what leads to Lucas circling the wagons.

I enjoyed this film as a crime story and a period piece. It wasn't great, but I don't think it tried to reach for greatness, either, which is strange for a movie that runs over two hours. When a movie starts getting long, you know that the filmmakers are trying for an epic. They didn't here, and they're better for it.