Neeson stars as William Marks, a government lawman who seems ill-suited for his job, given his fear of lift-off. Not long after his plane is airborne, Marks starts receiving text messages on his secure-line phone, making a few personal cracks and announcing that a passenger will die every 20 minutes unless and until $150 million is wire-deposited into a bank account. It turns out Marks has a fellow federal agent (Anson Mount) on board with him, whom he immediately suspects. Naturally, though, things turn out to be a lot thornier, and as Marks tries to get the flight attendants (Michelle Dockery and Lupita Nyong’o) to keep everyone calm and cooperative, an array of passengers and even the pilots (a group which includes Julianne Moore, Scoot McNairy, Corey Stoll, Nate Parker, Linus Roache and Shea Whigham) come in and out of focus as suspects. Of course, it doesn’t help or look good for Marks when the account is revealed to be in his name, and passengers watching in-flight TV begin seeing him identified as the hijacking culprit.

Non-Stop‘s screenplay, by first-timers John W. Richardson, Christopher Roach and Ryan Engle, suffers from the sort of contortionist aches that fairly commonly plague studio genre fare; the scribes take a purposefully ridiculous but entertaining conceit and then, rather than invest deeply and honestly in characters and the tension of how things will turn out, they expend a lot of time and energy on head feints and red herrings and capital-T twists and turns. Re-writes and different writers are of course common in Hollywood, but screenplays of this sort aren’t shaped so much by honest story notes, one gets the feeling, as directives to make the current movie more like that other movie from two years ago, but less like this film from earlier in the year from a competing studio, though maybe with a pinch of the same thing that was in that other successful movie starring the same actor in this movie. Sure, Non-Stop exists because the Taken films and 2011’s Unknown made an obscene amount of money — we all know that. But we could aim for a little more than 10 to 15 percent of gradient differentiation in our cash grabs, couldn’t we?

Editor Jim May and director Jaume Collet-Serra, who previously collaborated with Neeson on the aforementioned Unknown, bring a straightforward economy to the action beats, but also fail to come up with a more compelling way to mark the passage of time. Normally that would be the job of the script, but here it’s so consumed with whodunit? head games (bound to be a letdown or shrug for most) as to ignore the basic question of what it might feel like to be a passenger on such a flight. (It certainly doesn’t help that, 30 minutes into the film, there’s a dead body in a bathroom that no one happens to come across.) That’s the real and potentially unique element of Non-Stop, but it’s brushed aside to allow for Neeson’s swaggering redemption. In comparison to recent dreck like Pompeii, Non-Stop is a worthwhile alternative, it’s true. But that doesn’t make it good in its own right. (Universal, PG-13, 107 minutes)