Plane (2023)

Plane is the kind of lean, no-nonsense action thriller that reminds you how satisfying a movie can be when it knows exactly what it is and executes with confidence: a survival scenario that turns into a pressure-cooker rescue, with every decision feeling urgent and physical. Jean-François Richet keeps the storytelling brisk and clear, staging the mayhem with a craftsman’s grip so the tension never wanders and the thrills feel earned rather than inflated. Gerard Butler is especially effective here—not as a quip machine, but as a competent, exhausted professional whose stubborn decency becomes its own kind of heroism, and the film’s pulpy premise plays like a promise it fully intends to keep. Fair warning: it’s violent and salty-mouthed, but if you want efficient, crowd-pleasing genre entertainment that moves like a freight train, this one lands the plane and sticks it.

Plane is trying to be a lean, old-school survival action thriller where a competent pilot and an unlikely ally keep ordinary passengers alive in a bad place, and on that basic level it delivers steady momentum. The problem is it’s stitched together from familiar hostage-and-mercenary beats, with thin characters who exist mainly to move you from one shootout to the next, and the whole thing can feel a bit cut-rate rather than truly tense. If you’re allergic to B-movie plotting, convenient coincidences, and lots of gunfire plus strong language, this will test your patience. If you just want Gerard Butler doing no-nonsense hero work with a few solid set pieces and don’t need originality, it’s a perfectly serviceable time-killer.