There is a woman.  She has a 6-year-old daughter.  They board a plane.  They plane takes off.  The mother falls asleep.  When she wakes up, her daughter is not there.  She looks around the plane.  The flight attendants start searching.  There is simply no trace of her.  The mother starts freaking out.  An air marshall keeps her calm.  A flight attendant checks the passenger manifest.  The daughter was never on the plane.  No one ever saw her.

It’s a suspenseful premise and it’s all very Hitchcock like.  A girl goes missing at 36,000 feet above sea level.  How can this possibly happen?  I was very intrigued and having the film set in such an enclosed space only increased the suspense.  Jodie Foster’s performance as the mother is gripping and you sense the confusion that is raging through her mind.

What follows is the single worst ending to a film you will see in 2005.  I can’t possibly imagine that Jodie Foster signed on to appear in this film after having first read this dismal excuse for a script.  People have different tastes and like different movies but how can anyone like this?  The plot holes are so obvious that a 10-year-old could pick them out.  It’s as if the screenwriters came up with the story then didn’t know how to end it.  So instead of scrapping the idea, they tried to “pull a swifty” on the audience.

I’ll remember Flightplan for a long time because it sets a benchmark for lunacy that I can compare other dodgy endings to.   Over.