To bring new terror to air travel we have Snakes on a Plane, which has opened without a press show, though not to protect airline passengers from further anxieties. It's to allow audiences to make up their own minds. The movie is a compendium of familiar characters, scenes and incidents borrowed or inherited from disaster movies, thrillers, horror flicks and snake pictures, all built around that old reliable plot of killers determined to prevent a cop delivering a key witness to testify in a crucial trial. In this case a young surfer has seen Hawaiian criminal Eddie Kim brutally murder a Californian district attorney and is being flown on the red-eye from Honolulu to Los Angeles in the custody of FBI agent Samuel L Jackson, an actor experienced at keeping afloat in a sea of cliches. Kim's chosen tool of assassination is to get a vast assortment of the world's most venomous snakes on board and have them set loose and turned aggressive. Exactly how he manages this is only partially explained. But as terror has already set in long before such matters are broached, most of us are already too shocked to bother, especially people like me and Indiana Jones whose Orwellian Room 101 would be full of such reptiles.
The first two victims are an amorous couple having sex in the toilet and punished for their Mile High Club activities. The third is a macho guy in the other toilet whose interest in his penis is shared by a snake coming up from the lavatory bowl. From then it's an all-out war and, as Jackson is the only famous face, we can't be sure who'll die and in which order, though we fancy the sexist co-pilot and the belligerent Englishman (who objects to being turned out of first class to accommodate the FBI) will get theirs.
The movie is sadistic, ruthless and graphic (a scene involving an anaconda is particularly memorable); director David Ellis sustains the tension pretty well and his screenwriters have new tricks up their sleeves whenever things look like sagging. The laughs rarely come in the wrong places.
We're expected to guffaw when a stewardess says: 'I can't believe I'd ever have to say this, but is there anyone here who can fly a plane?' And when Jackson goes into action shouting: 'I've had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane,' we laugh and cheer.
Of its kind, the movie's surprisingly good.