ACTION; 1hr 46min
STARRING: Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore
Survival mode: Neeson
Air marshal William Marks (Neeson) clocks onto a packed night-time flight from New York to London with his twin, cigs-booze vices primed and the greyish weariness of a man at odds with life. Ironically, Bill isn’t wild about flying — or anything much else from the looks of him. But that pales into insignificance when, airborne at 10.53 PM, the marshal receives a text from an anonymous passenger demanding that $150 million be wired to a specified bank account. If not, every 20 minutes someone on the plane will die. (And you think your job sucks.)
With Moore lending a classy hand as Bill’s ambiguous seat-mate and every increasingly agitated passenger a potential suspect, including Bill himself, director Jaume Collet-Serra (Unknown) works a sustained skin-crawl in jolting increments. Neeson is a reliably charging bull, fuming with primed purpose and hefty urgency. This isn’t necessarily his finest hour — despite his best efforts and a great, grunty touch-down, Non-Stop pans out as a three-star, anticlimactic ride. But with the luck of the Irish, there’s no denying it’s a solid three stars.
