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Film: Non-Stop
Cast: Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, Scott McNary, Michelle, Cockery, Nate Parker, Anson Mount, Luis roach, Omar Netwally.Director: Jason Butler Harner
Cinema: Eastgate
Type of film: Airplane Hi-jacking
Running time: 118 minutes
Age restriction: 16
Reviewed by Joel White

The film “Non-Stop” makes of the viewer a passenger on a non-stop flight from New York to Iceland’s capital Reykjavit.
Seeing a film in which all the characters, along with the storyline, is so heavily restricted and confined, calls to mind the battle which Hollywood fought in its early days in the 1930s.

Choosing to call their product “motion-pictures” or alternately moving pictures, Hollywood’s early moguls and pioneers found themselves hard pressed to justify the heavily confined locales.

Clearly this is no longer an issue as film makers have become as peripatetic as holiday goers and they are no longer on the defensive when lowering their (travel) sights.

And so we have the film “Non-Stop” which gives the viewer an overwhelming sense of the action possible during a flight in which the plane and its passengers are in dire peril from beginning to end.

The actor Liam Neeson, born in Northern Ireland in 1952, has been at the top of popularity lists since his debut in the film “Excalibur” in 1981. In this film his role is that of a United States Federal Air Marshal who boards planes incognito in the hope of dealing with potential saboteurs.

In this film we see immediately that his “cover” has been blown by a fellow passenger who is prepared to commit suicide by destroying the plane if his demands are not met.

I found the ploy fairly slim and far-fetched, but soon was carried along by the clever dialogue as well as the depicted behaviour of the passengers (146 in all: we are told).

Communication is via cellphones on board, with outside intervention hardly considered. Interestingly, not for one minute is the villain’s ability and willingness to carry out creasing number of the passengers become aware of, and react to, the threat they face. Suspense (Hollywood’s basis for its claim to fame) is superbly maintained as minute by minute we, the audience, are kept abreast of how much time is left for that coterie of passengers,  many of whom we feel we have come to know.