Flightplan

A widow on a transcontinental flight (Jodie Foster) suddenly can’t find her 6-year-old daughter—and everyone insists that the girl never boarded the plane at all. Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray’s script reworks Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 classic The Lady Vanishes, including the topical references (Nazi Germany for Hitchcock, airborne terrorism here), but, metaphorically speaking, the whole thing never gets off the ground. Director Robert Schwentke drives Foster to the wildest overacting of her career, but otherwise his pacing is so sluggish that the plot holes gape like chasms. A script with this many red herrings is always liable to smell. Dowling, Ray and Schwentke should be required to study Red Eye to see how this sort of thing is done. Peter Sarsgaard and Sean Bean co-star.