Posts tagged Julianne Moore

“Name Says It All”

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

NON-STOP stars Liam Neeson as Bill Marks, a U.S. Federal air marshal assigned to an overnight flight from New York to London.

I know what you’re thinking. What could possibly happen on an airline flight that could keep the audience’s attention for a whole movie, right?

Well, how about a threat that someone on the airplane is going to die every 20 minutes unless a ransom is paid, people do start dying, and then finally a bomb is discovered. Does that get your attention?

The movie begins with Marks waiting at the curb of JFK Airport before boarding his flight to have a cigarette, and a man approaches him to ask for a light.

Without being asked anything, the man says, “I’m headed to Amsterdam.”

Once he is on the airplane, Marks is constantly looking around, checking out all the passengers, and evaluating them for any possible trouble they might cause.

He comforts a little girl on the airplane who is flying by herself for the first time and is a little bit frightened. Then he calls someone on his cellphone and says that he can’t stay in London for three days and whoever he is talking to has to get him back to New York on the first plane available.

A woman named Jen, played by Julianne Moore, gets the man sitting next to Marks in the window seat to trade seats with her, and Jen and Marks start talking to one another.

Even though Marks flies all the time for his job, he hates flying and especially has trouble during takeoffs.

Then Marks gets a text message on his cellphone over the secure line on the airplane, and the message says that in exactly 20 minutes someone on the plane is going to die unless $150 million is transferred into a particular bank account, and if it isn’t confirmed, someone dies again in the next 20 minutes.

Sure enough, someone does die from unnatural circumstances, and now Marks has to find whoever is sending him the messages, prevent the next death, and use the help of only two people on the plane he can trust, Jen and a flight attendant he knows from previous flights, Nancy, played by Michelle Dockery, who plays Lady Mary in the “Downton Abbey” TV series.

NON-STOP lives up to its name.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”