“Non-Stop” The Name Says It All
Mar 5th
“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.”
Non-Stop – Movie Trailer
Mar 4th
Global action star Liam Neeson stars in NON-STOP, a suspense thriller played out at 40,000 feet in the air. During a transatlantic flight from New York City to London, U.S. Air Marshal Bill Marks (Neeson) receives a series of cryptic text messages demanding that he instruct the government to transfer $150 million into an off-shore account. Until he secures the money, a passenger on his flight will be killed every 20 minutes. NON-STOP, which reunites Neeson with UNKNOWN director Jaume Collet-Serra and producer Joel Silver, co-stars Golden Globe Award winner Julianne Moore and will be released by Universal Pictures on February 28, 2014. The StudioCanal production is also produced by Andrew Rona and Steve Richards.
“3 Days to Kill” Extraneous Subplots
Feb 26th
“Extraneous Subplots”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
3 DAYS TO KILL stars Kevin Costner as Ethan, a CIA agent on a mission in Paris, where he happens to live when he isn’t working.
The mission is to capture a terrorist known as The Wolf, who is in possession of a dirty bomb and whom the CIA has been after for 10 years.
Ethan has a nagging cough from what he says is a cold that is killing him, and he was thinking of calling in sick even though he hasn’t had a sick day in 32 years of working for the CIA.
Ethan has an estranged wife, Christine, and a teenage daughter, Zoey, who live in Paris, but whom he hasn’t seen in five years, and when Ethan tries to call Zoey and wish her a happy birthday, the mission to capture The Wolf is compromised, and all hell breaks loose.
Ethan ends up chasing The Wolf’s henchman, known as the Albino, on foot, but Ethan collapses onto the ground just as he is about to catch him, and Ethan says, “I’m not running after you anymore.”
The Albino thus escapes, but this scene is designed to set up a similar scene which is the climax of the movie.
Ethan then finds out that his cough is more serious than a cold, and he is told that he has no more than three or five months to live and also told that the CIA thanks him for his service.
As if that isn’t bad enough, when Ethan goes to his apartment in Paris, he finds a family living there as squatters, and the law won’t let him kick them out.
Ethan wants to see Zoey before he dies, arranges to meet Christine and Zoey, and when Christine has to go to London for three days, Ethan agrees to watch Zoey while Christine is gone, thus setting up the double meaning of the title, because The Wolf comes back into the story.
Because Ethan might have spotted The Wolf in the compromised mission, he is recruited to find and kill The Wolf in return for an experimental drug that might save his life.
Zoey doesn’t even know what Ethan does for a living, and she has problems of her own that take up Ethan’s time and attention.
3 DAYS TO KILL has too many extraneous subplots.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
