Snakes on a Plane

There was no way Snakes on a Plane (2006) could have lived up to the furor surrounding it for months prior to its release. And it doesn't. The film is on the same general level as Anaconda, whose huge digital snake terrorized passengers on a boat on the Amazon. Some of the snakes on the plane in this film are actual snakes while others are digital, and it's often easy to tell the difference.

Snakes on a Plane exploits primal fears of slithering reptiles and the claustrophobic entrapment some people feel within the fuselage of a jetliner. Halfway through the film some sixty people on the jetliner are dead, bitten by poisonous snakes placed on the airliner to prevent a government witness from testifying against a Hawaiian gangster. The snakes make their appearance while the plane is still two hours from Los Angeles. Soon one pilot is dead, and after a valiant effort to keep the plane in flight the other pilot dies too. The only person left capable of flying the plane is a rap artist's bodyguard played by Keenan Thompson. Keenan has over 2000 hours of pilot experience flying video game airplanes, and on the basis of that he has to bring the plane in for a landing at LAX.

The plane is full of distinctive passengers who remind you of the passengers in such films as The High and the Mighty, Airport, and other such films. The drama of those other films came out of the private lives of the passengers, all of whom are brought together in a moment of crisis on an airplane high in the sky. The interest of those films, where there is interest, grows from the way we care about those passengers. (The High and the Mighty is the classic film in this genre). In Snakes on a Plane most of the passengers are developed only far enough for you to take note when they are bitten by a snake. They're not human beings with interesting back stories—they're victims. A pair of newlyweds meets their snake in the bathroom, where they are trying to enter the mile-high club. A snoring overweight Hispanic woman meets her fate when a snake slithers up her dress. A stewardess on her last flight is bitten when she attempts to keep a cobra from biting a five-year old. An obnoxious Frenchman is crushed to death by a giant anaconda and then swallowed head-first after he throws another passenger's Chihuahua into its jaws. And so it goes.

Most of the major characters in the film survive. The baby and two small boys survive. If the film has any real guts, the anaconda would have swallowed the baby and one of the boys wouldn't have survived the flight. The only real star in the film is Samuel L. Jackson, who seems to appear in every film these days, and who waits until nearly the end of the story to utter the famous line that will give this film its own immortality. Jackson seems bored with his role, but even so he performs well. The only other actor of any note is Juliana Margulies of ER fame, and this film won't do anything to restore her sagging career.

Films such as Alien and Halloween and even Nightmare on Elm Street rely to varying extents on tension and suspense to hold the viewer's interest. There is little tension or suspense in this film. You know that at some point the snakes are going to appear, and you can guess pretty much how things are going to go when they do. Rather than stirring up suspense, this film relishes in showing you how various passengers come to their deaths when snakes bite them. There's too much attention on the gore and the effects of the poison and the faces grimacing in pain. In one scene we are shown how a man foams at the mouth in his last seconds. One woman is bitten in the eye. A male passenger is bitten while relieving himself in the bathroom—you can guess where he is bitten. Other passengers are subjected to multiple bites all at once. Some die quickly. Others die slowly and horribly. The film makes a point of displaying their swollen, discolored bodies. At one point, one of the pilots, before he is killed, radios LAX air control that 60 passengers are dead. This is a horrific fact, yet it seems merely incidental here. The point of this film is to show death, but death doesn't seem to matter.

When the plane finally does land in Los Angeles and the surviving passengers emerge, it is a kind of victory. Everyone is happy and joking. Samuel Jackson and Juliana Margulies embrace and make a date. When a last snake manages to bite the star witness in the chest, Jackson shoots the snake with two gunshots that go through the snake right into the witness' chest. Well, not really. The witness is wearing a bullet proof vest, so he is unaffected by the bullets or the snake. Everyone laughs. No one seems to remember that sixty or more dead passengers lie in the plane. They don't matter. The survivors have survived. Margulies and Jackson will have their date. Jackson and his witness are shown surfing together in the film's last scene. The studio has its money. Case closed.

A subplot in the film involving a herpetologist trying to help the police locate anti-venom seems almost comically superfluous. No one cares.

Let's be clear: this film was made by the pre-release hype. Everyone went to see it with high expectations. And perhaps those expectations lured them into liking the film. But Snakes on a Plane has all the lineaments of a low-budget C-grade movie—no artistry, no interest, a cynical, perverse, obsequious pandering for the viewer's money.