Passengers: Review By B. Alan Orange

Anne Hathaway has decided to follow-up her award worthy performance in the highly touted Johnathon Demme drama Rachael Getting Married with this dour, weirdly sublime thriller that doesn’t ever really thrill at all. Passengers is the type of film you can’t talk about without spoiling the whole messy climax. The ending is a nip twist that will only shock those grandmas in attendance that came to see a Lifetime movie on the big screen. The story’s conclusion devours the drama of the piece as a whole, and any visceral relationship you might have felt with these fleeting fictional characters is completely ruined.

The film is set up as pure emotional claptrap best served on a basic cable Sunday night. Anne Hathaway plays a grief councilor assigned to five individuals that have survived a plane crash. One of those survivors is Patrick Wilson, and instead of attending the group council meetings that have been set up, he uses an individually allotted amount of personal time to pursue and court the beautiful councilor. While they spend a great deal of the film’s running time flirting, taking freezing dips in the cold waters of Vancouver, and eventually bumping up against one another’s naked bodies in a slightly awkward sex scene, shady individuals track down and seemingly make the other survivors disappear.

At first, the plane crash looks like an accident brought on by the pilot. But that’s not the case. An explosion dropped the plane onto a deserted beach, and those in charge of PR at the airline don’t want this information to get out. So they are systematically making the crash survivors drop without a trace. Or are they? That’s where things get tricky, and you should turn away right now if you don’t wish to know anymore about the film. It is a slight mystery, after all. And if you know the eventual outcome before walking into the theater, there really is no reason to buy that very expensive ticket.

Okay. You’ve been forewarned. Now, I can get down to the nitty-gritty of this unsuspected Halloween ghost story. Yeah, that’s right. I said it. This is a spooky creeper that comes on a little too late to make any real impression. The film’s writer, Ronnie Christensen, is infatuated with M. Night Shyamalan’s the Sixth Sense, and he must have kept himself up at night, wondering how he could top that gut punch of an ending. Maybe his script succeeded, but director Rodrigo Garcia fails at the conceit miserably. What should be interesting and entertaining is mawkish and raw. It’s watchable, but just barely. And that’s only because you want to know what is going on. The strange thing is, the poster gives away the whole surprise. Yeah, those are ghosts behind Annie. I just wish she had learned of her fate a little earlier than the end credit sequence. Then, maybe Ronnie and Rodrigo could have had some fun with it.

Ghosts. And ghost stories. They can be fun to watch when executed with the right amount of energy.

That said, the film is not incredibly bad. It’s not going to turn into a cult classic, by any means. It’s just never interesting enough to be that good. It sort of knows its place in the genre. This is the type of thriller that would play on a second bill Drive-In tour with Eagle Eye. And its okay with that. You should be too. If you found yourself so inclined to check out that double feature, this will allow you enough time to get your buzz back to an acceptable place. There are aimable free chunks of space that allow for a restroom break and a trip to the snack bar. And if you’re lucky enough, you can time it just right to get a handy or a slob job during the naked Annie parts.

Yeah, as a second feature on a drive-in bill, I’m okay with Passengers. But as a film you might want to spend your hard earned cash on in this harsh economic climate, it gets a Boo! You’re better off busting out your Sixth Sense DVD, or watching The Happening.

(All of B. Alan Orange’s reviews are based on the Boo! or Whoop-doo! evaluation system.)