E-Mail This Article to a Friend FLIGHTPLAN

88 MINUTES | BOSTON COMMON + FENWAY + FRESH POND + CHESTNUT HILL + SUBURBS

In Flightplan, Jodie Foster displays grief, shock, terror, confusion, possible madness, rage, and resourcefulness with all the authority you expect of a great actor. Unfortunately, she’s trapped in a banal commercial vehicle. That would be the "E-474," an airbus the size of a shopping mall. In one of director Robert Schwentke’s more arresting images, Foster’s Kyle Pratt and her six-year-old daughter enter the empty economy section; it’s a sea of seats each with the same inane video playing on the screen on the headrest. Kyle is already deep in mourning for her husband, whose body lies in a casket in the hold, but her problems mount when she wakes up and her daughter is gone. Captain and crew and an air marshal turn the ship upside down (it’s got more secret passages than a fun house) until they suspect that Kyle is nuts and the girl a hallucination. Dishearteningly similar to Red Eye in its devices and dreads, Flightplan is as fulfilling as a holding pattern.