The first 40 or so minutes of this are among the worst in a Hollywood blockbuster in recent memory - it starts with a silly idea (an automatic plane of the future starts thinking for itself) and compounds it with foolishness upon foolishness - a steal from 2001 (watching lips read) that amounts to outright theft, riffs on other better movies (eg Top Gun), lazy twists (it's a lightning strike that sets the plane off - they couldn't come up with anything better than a lightning strike??),poor pacing (the leads are on leave, go on a mission, then go on another leave - within the first 30 minutes! How much leave do these people get?), clunky scenes with people just sitting around talking without advancing the story (eg the whole Thailand sequence, which includes uncomfortable stuff of Jamie Foxx leching after a beautiful Thai who can't speak English, this has too many dodgy overtones, and seems mainly to have been included to have an excuse to get Jessica Biel into a bikini, which is fair enough but how about incorporating it into the plot a bit better), unbelievable and lazy reasons for action sequences ("there's a bunch of terrorists", "there's another bunch of terrorists"), and a plane that likes to play songs... for the soundtrack.
But once the plane goes haywire and it becomes a chase movie the whole thing improves, with a really good sequence of Jessica Biel ejecting from her plane and a good old government conspiracy. Filmed in Australia, so Aussies will enjoy spotting Aussie locales like the Blue Mountains and local faces like John Waters, Richard Roxburgh, Ian Bliss, Alex Davies, Megan Gale (very pretty but not very good delivering her one line) and some faces from the Old Fitz, Blazey Best and Randall Mettam. Another in the long line of duds made at Fox studios.
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