Flightplan starts in Berlin in Germany as grieving widow Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) & her young six year old daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston) board a flight to New York, together with her dead husband in the cargo hold who they intend to bury back in the US the plane takes off for it's long journey to New York. Kyle & Julia both fall asleep, when Kyle wakes up Julia has gone. At first Kyle thinks Julia is wandering around somewhere but after checking the plane Kyle can see no sign of her daughter. Becoming increasing worried about her missing daughter Julia demands that the plane is searched, Captain Rich (Sean bean) is unsure what to think as no-one remembers even seeing Julia & she is no present on the passenger manifesto either. With no record of Julia ever having boarded the plane Kyle's accusations are not taken seriously but she know's that Julia is somewhere on the plane & Kyle is going to find her...

Directed by Robert Schwentke one has to say that for two thirds of it's duration Flightplan is a neat little mystery thriller in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock's classic The Lady Vanishes (1933) although here instead of an old woman disappearing on a train a young girl goes missing on a plane, unfortunately the final third is a bit of a mess that really stretches credibility. While the first two thirds are nicely done with a gradual build-up of suspense & tension revolving around the mysterious disappearance of a young girl the explanation offered during the final third is just daft & full of plot holes. It seem like after a slow yet interesting first two thirds of Flightplan the makers decided they needed to up the action & pace & turned it into an action thriller with fights, shooting, explosions & the expected face-off between the heroine & villain. Some of the plot holes are gaping & too big to ignore like the idea that an airline would pay a huge ransom to a terrorist they have never even spoken to, how does the villain expect to get the money anyway? What proof doe they have it was ever really deposited in the bank account? The idea that a woman can get on a plane with a young girl & no-one notices the girl is absurd, the kidnapping & hiding of the girl again without anyone seeing anything is hard to believe & the villains plan was over complicated anyway relying on many coincidences, luck & pure chance to succeed as how did they manage to get themselves on the same flight as Kyle? How did they know for certain Kyle would go crazy & actually open the coffin? How were they going to make sure they were there when Kyle did open the coffin? Kidnapping a young girl in a plane cabin full of passengers is risky to say the least, what if Kyle hadn't gone to sleep or if Julia had woken up & screamed? At 90 odd minutes it moves along at a decent pace & while it does get very silly at the end the first two thirds are really quite good. The character's are thin, no-one is given any sort of background & even Kyle is very shallow as a character while her daughter barely gets two lines. There's also a quick stab at reversing expectations as the blatantly suspicious looking Arab guy's prove to be good blokes while the so-called all American hero protector on the flight turns out to be slime.

The film is pretty stylish as it goes with nice clean bright cinematography, there's no shaking camera here or quick machine gun editing. The film mixes suspense & tension & all out action with mixed results, the build-up is good & intriguing while the pay-off is loud, noisy & has zero credibility. The CGI computer effects are alright, they can't even film a proper plane taking off now it has to be a CGI computer effect. Not much violence until the last third & only one person dies in the whole thing anyway. It's just a pity that the script couldn't come up with a more plausible explanation for the first two thirds of the Flightplan which are suspenseful, it's like every time one idea is used to cover a plot hole or explain something it raises more questions & plot holes.

With a supposed budget of about $55,000,000 this had a lot of money spent on it, personally I think the same years Red Eye (2005) is much better overall as a woman finds herself kidnapped & blackmailed on a plane. The acting is OK, Jodie Foster is alright but doesn't bring much to Kyle, Sean Bean is wasted while Peter Sarsgaard is pretty good.

Flightplan is a film that I liked , sure the first two thirds are so much better than then eventual explanations & far fetched Hollywood thriller reasonings but overall I liked it. Not a great film by any means but a good one none the less if you can accept a few lapses in logic at the end.

Feature films invite us to defy reality, believe a fiction, suspend disbelief. The actor has to make the unreal, real. Jodie Foster has done this in the past with notable success and strings of awards – and often chosen stories that parallel our unwillingness to accept: a rape victim that no-one believed, a paranoid in a locked room that had every reason to be afraid, a scientist that finds proof of aliens. In Flightplan she goes one further – a mother who loses her daughter during a transatlantic flight and whom no-one (including, most of the time, the audience) believes.

Aircraft engineer Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) is devastated by the sudden death of her husband. She flies his body back to New York on a state-of-the-art airliner which she designed. Dozing off for a few minutes on the plane, she awakes to find her six year old daughter is missing. Frantic searches ensue as the mounting evidence suggests the daughter was never on board.

Flightplan combines a taut psychological thriller with a deepening mystery and tremendous emotional punch. But does the denouement justify the storyline, the switching positions we are forced to adopt about Kyle's sanity and the existence of her daughter? Or is it simply a story that cashes in on current passenger apprehension over hijacking and Foster's considerable acting talent? Foster is at her best, an outraged, highly intelligent woman with a mother's bottled up and barely contained grief providing simmering emotional force.

It is a remarkable testament to Foster's talent that she can carry such an unlikely story. She imbues the confined space of an aircraft with an energy that doesn't wilt for a moment and ensures our attention never flags. Ably assisted by Sean Bean as the Captain, wanting to give her every benefit of doubt but increasingly forced to accept the evidence of his own eyes, and Air Marshall Peter Sarsgaard who plays an interesting yet inscrutable character, we are mesmerised by Kyle Pratt and our own difficulty in knowing whether to believe her. Whether the story was worthy of such talent is less clear. As the pieces unravel we are presented with a bewildering complexity of background information which, without Foster to carry it or Hitchcockian logic to prove it, we are tempted to dismiss with Flightplan as overambitious. As an exercise in powerful acting that stands up as a Saturday night thriller, Flightplan delivers in Club Class, but as the sum of its parts it is as convoluted and full of wishful thinking as someone trying to stretch out in Economy.

"Flightplan" seems to have affected IMDb contributors like no other film in recent memory. Mostly is bad. We didn't catch up with this picture until recently. Frankly, we are puzzled as to why the hatred. Granted, the film had the potential for being better, but it's not the total failure as some of the comments in this forum will make one believe. It appears there's an agenda to mark "Flightplan" comments as not useful.

Director Robert Schwentke working with Peter Dowling and Billy Ray's screen play, hasn't added much to the film in order to make it a thriller to be reckoned with, but, in general, the film is not a total waste, as seems to be the perception among contributors.

In a way, "Flightplan" plays with the viewer's perception as to who is behind the disappearance of Julia, the six year old girl traveling with her mother, Kyle, to New York. Kyle has suffered a great tragedy in her life when her husband was found dead in her building's courtyard. The fact that Kyle hasn't been able to accept the death is clear in the first sequence when we see her sitting inside the Alexanderplaz metro station in Berlin.

Kyle, an aircraft designing engineer, is a good mother. One can imagine her panic when she wakes up from a nap to find Julia's gone. No one seems to have noticed the little girl; there is no record of she ever been on board. Kyle meets resistance from the crew of the flight. Even the sky marshal, Carson, is no help at all. What's a mother to do? If one is in Kyle's shoes, one starts taking matter into her own hands.

Jodie Foster does a good job portraying Kyle. She is a mother who doesn't take no for an answer. In fact, she is the one that unravels the mystery surrounding her daughter's disappearance. The climax sequence is perfectly set, as one would expect it to be.

Peter Sarsgaard, is Carson, the sky marshal traveling in the economy section. He is in charge of the safety of the passengers on the flight. In an unusual role for him, Mr. Sarsgaard has some good chances in the movie. Sean Bean plays the pilot of the jumbo jet. Kate Beahan is seen as one of the flight attendants. Erika Christiensen is also part of the crew.

The best way to enjoy the film is not to compare it to anything else and just go for the entertaining value in it because we know this is not a ground breaking film, but thanks to Mr. Schwentke and his cast, it offers us a bumpy ride of a film.