Snakes on a Plane: Critic Reviews

What, exactly, is the joke? If this cornball exploitation disaster movie had been called Anaconda 3: Flight of Fear (or, as was once planned, Pacific Air 121), we could all stop pretending that there was something exotically tacky about it.

All anyone really needs to know about this amusingly crude, honestly satisfying artifact is snakes + plane + Samuel L. Jackson.

All those CGI snakes can be quite shudder-inducing. But there is also something cheerfully ridiculous in the way the film switches to rubber snakes for hand-to-hand combat.

There is also something educational to be gleaned here: Snakes are not indigenous to Hawaii and they don't attack unless provoked.

Snakes on a Plane is pure escapist fun and absolutely nothing more.

Jackson is The Man, and he bestrides this film with the authority of someone who knows the value of honest bilge. He's as much the auteur of this baby as the director and screenwriters, and that fierce glimmer in his eye is partly joy.

Like the flailing airline industry -- which probably sent executives out for ice packs when they heard the title -- it gives you the ride you paid for, and nothing extra.

This Internet-promoted lark about a Hawaii-to-L.A. flight besieged by a frenzied tangle of snakes is hilariously funny, full of fang-popping scares, and guaranteed to increase travel by train.

A staggeringly inane B-grade monster movie that doesn't pretend to be anything but a staggeringly inane B-grade monster movie and in fact so embraces its staggering B-grade inanity that it achieves a kind of elevated pop-cultural integrity.

Snakes is bad in a bland, calculated, marketing-is-all way, which is what you might expect from a movie that has been shaped around its marketing campaign from the jump (or from the slither, if you will).

Whether Snakes on a Plane means to be bad, or is just bad by being its own bad self, the truth is it's so bad that it's pretty good.

Intentional low camp always seems wrong unless it's very funny; in trash, one wants clumsiness, even a certain tackiness, and this movie has the production values and the high-tech fluency of a much bigger movie.

Without that title and a year's worth of Internet-fueled buzz, this would be just another forgettable, mildly entertaining, mid-August throwaway movie.

Me, I liked Anaconda better.

The plot is ridiculous and the characters are cardboard, but none of that really matters once the snakes get into the fuselage and start zapping people, the very definition of entertainment.

At the end, the crowd applauded to signify their ironic appreciation for the imperishable pleasures of trash culture. Unfortunately, with Snakes on a Plane, there isn't much of a joke to be in on.

It's the funniest thriller of the year, although I'm not sure if everything we laugh at is supposed to be amusing.

It is a great cheeseball of silliness, a 'B' movie that has enough sense to embrace its 'B'-ness and then squeeze, like a boa constrictor. It is intentionally sublimely ridiculous from beginning to end.

The movie is aware of its cheesiness, one reason it works so well. It's an exploitation flick that knows what it wants to do, and it gets the job done expertly.

Snakes on a Plane is at its best when it surrenders to the exuberant trashiness and matter-of-fact hilarity promised by its title.

If loving S.O.A.P. is wrong, I don't want to be right.

Sick as it is, it captures more of the joy of movie-going than virtually any other summer movie this year.

In short, Snakes on a Plane delivers exactly what it promised and then some. And how often can you say that about a movie these days?

The first Internet joke ever made into a movie, Snakes on a Plane is just ridiculous and depraved enough to excite a cult following among high campers who are ready to enlist in a movie that gets one over on Hollywood.

Snakes on a Plane could have been great, good-bad fun. All it had to do was live up to its name.