| Product: |
Snakes on a Plane (DVD) |
| Date: |
25/01/07 (150 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Hilarious, tongue in cheek and never takes itself serious
Disadvantages: Very lightwieght and formulaic
Snakes On A Plane! Does a film with such an illustrative title really need any further explanation on what it is about? The title pretty much tells you 80% of the story in just four words.
SOAP has an interesting creative story, born on the internet as an idea it exploded to mammoth proportions just on a rumour and high class marketing strategies like selling t-shirts with the title on to spread the word before the film had even begun to be made. Samuel L. Jackson purportedly was interested enough in the title alone to sign up because of it and even threatened to pull out when, for a brief period of time, the studio executives wanted it called something stupid, bland and ordinary like ‘Terror on Flight 21’! Now which one of the two possible titles are you more likely to be more interested in seeing, or at least finding out more about?
SOAP is a fun filled romp, it is not a great film, or even a good film but it is one of the most thoroughly enjoyable films I have seen in a long, long time! It never takes itself seriously for even one nanosecond and gives you exactly what you would expect from a film with the title Snakes On A Plane!
The two-line summary of the film is thus… A big time mobster kills a prosecutor in Hawaii, unfortunately for him there was a witness who is being escorted from Hawaii to LA to give evidence. The mobster cannot allow this to happen so he comes up with a plan to make sure the witness does not testify. To this end he makes sure that a massive crate full of deadly crates is put on the plane, and that they are aggressive by making sure the leis’ given to the passengers are covered in a pheromone. Add a time release on the lock of the crate and his creative plan is set, how could it possibly fail?
SOAP will not only live up to your expectations but will exceed them because you really cannot expect anything more than the title tells you. It not only tells you the basis of the whole story but tells you the whole ethos behind it… the b-movie styled action adventure/comedy/horror. It never once takes its foot off the pedal and once on the plane it is stuck in fifth gear all the way to its climax.
The passengers on the plane are every single clichéd character you could possibly think off. We have the arrogant Englishman, the rich girl, the rapper, the loving honeymooners, the woman with a baby, the randy couple etc, but you don’t really care, it all fits in with the mood of the film. In the same way Slither became a guilty pleasure so does SOAP. It is a seriously stupid, but great, film!
The film is populated with a good group of lesser known character actors to support the big star Jackson. David Koechner (Anchorman), Julianne Marguiles (E.R), Rachel Blanchard (Road Trip, Clueless TV series) and Bobby Canavale (Third Watch, Station Agent) amongst others. The main advantage of this casting is that it means Jackson doesn’t have to carry the whole film like Jack Black did in Nacho Libre.
Saying that Jackson is fantastic all the way through. He has the ability and charisma to carry off spoofing himself, and of course that is pretty much what he does all the way through this. He is playing a tough guy character, just liked we are used to seeing him in most of his movies, but he throws in an air of comedic chaos we rarely see from him, and chaos flows around him seemingly unnoticed, or at least ignored him.
His intro is the typical hard nosed FBI agent/cop intro scene, bringing all you need to know about him in 5 minutes, just pure class!
The one down side to it is that it does seem to be badly edited in a couple of places, most obviously in a bit with the Oriental martial artist who seems to appear somewhere different from where we last saw him. It doesn’t ruin the film but it does stand out as a mistake, and a confusing one at that.
Oh and if you do see this, which you really, really should if you want a good bit of B-movie fun and action, then make sure you watch the credits for the video by Cobra Starship… not only is the song and video great but the female singer is just soooo hot!
Summary: Snakes alive this is so much fun.
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