Plane might just be the most 3 star a movie can get. A perfectly ok action flick that gets the job done. You want more? Go watch a better movie. You want worse? Plenty worse out there.

The flick stars Gerard Butler as airline pilot who has to put his plane down on an island abandoned to a local militia. Can the pilot (and the criminal who was being transported on his plane) save the passengers and flight crew? Probably.

Everything aboard the airplane is actually very good… from the simple things like watching the procedures of a new captain boarding the plane to the desperation of the forced landing. Everything in the air is actually markedly better than the rest of the movie (except maybe for the airplane CGI).

Everything on the island… it gets the job done. And they spend way more time on the ground than in the air. It’s not bad gun-fu, but it’s hardly the best shoot ’em up I’ve seen. It’s perfectly serviceable. I’d have liked to see more character to the handful of passengers and flight crew, I suppose. But if would have been as perfunctory as Butler’s relationship with his daughter, then maybe not.

Yeah… that’s the movie for ya. If it was all about a plane in trouble in the air, I’d rate it higher. But they do land and they do get into gunfights and things go boom and that’s ok too. Overall, a pretty decent throwback to earlier era of action flicks. Not bad at all. Very three stars.

Score: 79