Flight

 

In Flight, Denzel Washington plays Captain Whip Whittaker, a highly skilled pilot whose personal life is in shambles, mostly due to his penchant for booze and coke.  On a routine flight from Orlando to Atlanta, the plane malfunctions and Whip must execute a death-defying crash landing in an open field.  Nearly everyone on board survives.  At first Whip is hailed as a hero, but then more and more suspicious information is uncovered concerning his activities in the night and morning leading up to the crash landing.

I have mixed feelings about Flight - I was completely with it until about 15 minutes before the end.  I thought Denzel Washington did a great job playing Whip.  I felt like I was on a roller coaster of emotions, watching his attempts to put down the bottle and get his life back under control.

But about 15 minutes before the end, Flight just totally lost me.  For a story about a complex character, I felt it ended by being tied up a bit too neatly for my liking.  The ending felt cliched to me.  I also felt like the movie struggled a bit with not knowing what it wanted to be.  It was primarily a drama but there were some comical scenes that mostly felt out of place.

Overall, not bad a bad watch, if you can ignore the cliched ending.  6 out of 10.