Setting a murder mystery on an airplane in flight is a neat premise — as long as it maintains suspense without sacrificing credibility.  Non-Stop takes this premise and stretches it well past the breaking point by tossing in extortion, 20-minute death deadlines, a bomb threat, one hundred fifty red herring passengers and a complete betrayal of physics.  Casual scrutiny leaves the screenplay’s rings of suspense in tatters, and yet, if one is in the right mood, it’s all kind of fun.

Liam Neeson stars as a Federal air marshal on an international flight to London who is contacted by cell phone that unless a $150 million ransom is paid someone will be killed on his flight every twenty minutes.  Sure enough, right on schedule, a man is killed.  The strange thing is the identity of the killer, a fact which threatens to turn everything we know about the situation upside down.  Everything becomes suspect. This aspect of the film works quite well until the climax, when a rushed explanation fails to make much sense at all.

Jaume Collet-Serra directs the film (he also made Neeson’s Unknown, a story with similar issues and problems) with some finesse, but absolutely no sense of logic, or even of place.  A jet with a killer on board ought to be a very claustrophobic space, yet Neeson continually finds quiet areas to confer with the crew, beat up suspects, read threatening texts and be labeled a terrorist by his own employer on the ground. Although the action takes its time to build, the story moves at such breakneck speed near the end that there is simply no time nor room for logic.  This holds true for the laws of physics as well, which posit that pulling out of a dive will pin passengers and their things to their seats, or the floor; except, of course, for Neeson’s gun, which pops into the air as if the plane had just topped a parabolic curve.  I also didn’t care for the unconvincing special effects used as the plane burrows in for its hard landing in Iceland.

Despite these rather glaring inadequacies, I found the film consistently interesting and even compelling.  Trying to spot the bad guy amidst a cabin full of passengers all too aware of what could be happening to them is good sport.  In fact, the portrayal of the passengers is convincing, especially as Neeson continually refuses to tell anyone what is really going on.  If it wasn’t for the extortion and trying to blame it all on the alcoholic air marshal, this could have been a real effective potboiler.  And I still can’t quite accept the bad guy’s reasons for putting a whole plane load of people in danger even after hearing his ravings.  I just don’t see the point.  Poor scriptwriting, in my opinion.  It’s surprising to me that the film is entertaining at all considering the bad script and direction.  But it is kind of fun.  ☆ ☆.  27 March 2014.