By Armond White

Snakes on a Plane 

Directed by David R. Ellis

Snakes on a Plane must be the first Low-Concept film. Its disaster-movie premise—poisonous snakes are unleashed on a passenger plane by a crime boss attempting to stop an FBI witness from testifying—is so uncreative, it makes those calculated, High-Concept Paramount programmers of the 1980s like Flashdance and Top Gun seem almost Shakespearean. Low-Concept combines the craven and the ludicrous without shame.

And who is there to chide filmmakers so brazenly contemptuous of the public? By celebrating Snakes on a Plane for its blatant commercialism, the news media has demonstrated the most astounding collusion with Hollywood since The Blair Witch Project. (Remember that hoax?) It’s part of our ongoing cultural degradation to promote Snakes on a Plane for its bold stupidity. Any response other than derision would be pathetic. 

First, you have to consider the film’s built-in derision. It comes from the filmmakers’ cynicism. Director David R. Ellis teeters on a tightrope between parody and gruesomeness. Ellis uses the 1980 film Airplane as his model for setting up FBI agent Neville Flynn (Samuel L. Jackson) to escort crime witness Sean Jones (Nathan Phillips) on a flight from Hawaii to the mainland onboard a 747 with Claire Miller (Juliana Margulies) as the lead flight attendant. The low-budget, insincerely performed story repeats overly familiar jokes (“Is there anyone here who knows how to fly a plane?”) so that even if you laugh, the response is stale. Then, when the snakes emerge (complete with snake-vision p.o.v.), the film becomes a flat-out horror movie—full of panicking passengers and gross, detailed bitings, contusions, swellings, bleeding and mutilation. (It gets kinky with snakes latching onto a woman’s nipple, a man’s penis and even pleasuring a sleeping female passenger.)

The film is built around pandemonium-orgies that are as relentlessly violent as Bryan Singer’s scenes of flight turbulence in Superman Returns; there’s a similar excess of brutality that is a sure sign of filmmaking incompetence—and insensitivity. In Snakes on a Plane, the film goes to extremes from gags to cruelty that will disarm teen viewers and possibly amuse disinterested cultural pundits. (Already, The Nation magazine blog has promoted the movie as a convenient anti-Bush allegory.) But this contemptuous style might also throw all audiences into emotional chaos, teaching them to feel nothing.

Samuel L. Jackson epitomizes the lowness of the film’s concept. Finally playing a hero, his character is actually only incidental to the passengers’ desperate efforts to fight back the snakes. (Kenan Thompson’s Fat Albert charm steals the movie as a PlayStation enthusiast who takes over the pilot’s seat.) Jackson is only here to certify degradation; he’s as much an emblem of exploitation movie crassness as Aunt Jemima is an emblem of pancakes. Sample Jackson witticisms: “A snake on crack!” and “A spork!” and the climactic, “I have had it with these muthafuckin’ snakes on this muthafuckin’ plane!” If you laugh at that, it’s not because it’s funny. Snakes on a Plane is like Airplane without wit and Soul Plane without soul.