I dutifully caught Web sensation Snakes on a Plane yesterday afternoon, and it underwhelms in almost every significant way, proving that New Line’s scattershot-campy, sleight-of-hand marketing comes from a place of internally admitted weakness.
The crowd with which I saw the movie was exactly the right one, full of scruffy-faced twenty- and thirtysomethings sporting vintage T-shirts and an appropriate holler-back attitude. It’s the product itself that disappoints, however. I’ve said before that the success of Snakes on a Plane hinges on being either a truly exceptional genre entry that refashions and redeploys heretofore tired rules in a fresh way (see: Speed) or being so gloriously, tongue-in-cheek bad from gate to gate that the audience exults in feeling smarter than the film.
Despite the title-evidenced simplicity of the concept, though, Snakes on a Plane actually makes pretty dismal use of its space. The script, by John Heffernan, doesn’t generate any feelings of claustrophobic tension, and there’s surprisingly little of the passengers’ plan of defense and attack that has to do with their surroundings and implements. Instead, they… stack luggage, because clearly no one could think that snakes can slither through small cracks and otherwise constricted spaces.
Certain problems seem born of the re-shoots designed to goose the movie’s rating up to an R from a PG-13, as one gets tight close-ups of gore (a high heel stiletto through an ear, for instance) that are squirmingly effective but don’t smoothly integrate to the anarchically staged action. Many set pieces just flat out fail, however — surprising since the staging in director David Ellis’ Final Destination 2 was quite strong. There are several pockets, undeniably, of amped-up, glorious silliness, and the performances (including Todd Louiso as a snakes expert and David Koechner as a slightly lecherous co-pilot given to some great, zonked line readings) are appropriately heightened — everyone knows what kind of movie they’re in.
But Snakes on a Plane is marked by passages of inscrutable blandness, and its grand finale — in which the plane finally lands — marks some of the worst editing in a genre picture in recent years. It’s just awful, inexcusable. The fact that the film finished second at the box office this week to Will Ferrell’s holdover NASCAR comedy Talladega Nights (Snakes‘ Thursday night preview grosses don’t count toward its weekend tally) and only pulled in a little over $1 million more than the decidedly hype-free Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid did in a similar frame two years ago suggests that audiences don’t necessarily feel the need to pay to see something they follow anecdotally online, and thus “complete” the experience. Maybe everyone really was laughing at you, Snakes on a Plane, and not with you. (New Line, R, 105 minutes)
