Flight is the highly-altered account of Sully Sullenberger's heroic plane landing on the Hudson River. And the similarities stop there. Yes, the pilot lands a plane heroically, but literally everything else is changed. Pilot Whip Whitaker has just another normal day flying a routine flight while higher than the f**king plane is. He does a few lines of cocaine, drinks a couple six-packs of Bud, and has a little Vodka on the plane itself. You know, pilot stuff.
The plane begins to fall apart, and Whitaker saves the flight by flying the damn thing upside-down and clipping the steeple off of a church. Thank God he didn't hit anything important. But after the crash, blood tests show an alcohol level of .24, with .08 being the legal DRIVING average, let alone flying. Using a clever lawyer (Don Cheadle) and a drug dealer (John Goodman), Whitaker denies everything in order to keep himself out of prison for the four lives he failed to save.
Personally, I expected a movie with a little more intrigue. Maybe the pilot could have been framed or something... but since the thing wasn't a true story in any sense of the word, it had no set plot to adhere to. And so we were treated to almost two whole hours of this drunk-ass pilot trying to get his s**t together.
It's a lot more interesting than it sounds. Whitaker really has a drinking problem, and possibly the most gut-wrenching scene in the film is when he absolutely can't bear to refuse a Vodka from a mini-bar, and ends up consuming basically the entire thing. He goes to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, but that doesn't work out so well. It all builds up to the final scene, where he has to testify in front of an FAA committee and lie about his alcohol intake.
Final score for Flight? 8/10 stars. Although it wasn't the movie I was looking forward to, it was still a good chunk of filmmaking to tide us over to The Hobbit, Django Unchained, and (how could I forget) DIE HARD FIVE. I can't f**king wait.
Bye!
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