Producers: Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Mark Vahradian, Marc Butan, Gerard Butler and Alan Siegel   Director: Jean-François Richet   Screenplay: Charles Cumming and J.P. Davis   Cast: Gerard Butler, Mike Colter, Yoson An, Daniella Pineda, Paul Ben-Victor, Remi Adeleke, Joey Slotnick, Evan Dane Taylor, Claro de los Reyes, Kelly Gale, Haleigh Hekking, Lilly Krug, Tara Westwood, Oliver Trevena, Quinn McPherson, Paul Ben-Victor and Tony Goldwyn   Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: C+

One could hardly come up with a plainer title than “Plane,” but while Jean-François Richet’s movie is nothing more than a Gerard Butler action potboiler, it’s one that’s competently made, delivering the adrenaline rush his fans expect.  Is it a great movie?  No.  Is it even a good one?  Not really.  But its efficiency sets it apart from many recent examples in its admittedly vacuous but popular genre.

Butler plays commercial pilot Brodie Torrance, a still-grieving widower devoted to his collegiate daughter Daniele (Haleigh Hekking), whom he plans to join for a reunion in Hawaii after his New Year’s Eve flight from Singapore to Tokyo for Trailblazer Airlines.  He and his eager young co-pilot Dele (Yoson An) are looking forward to an uneventful flight, but a company executive, interested only in the bottom line, has instructed them to fly directly into bad weather rather than go around it to save on fuel costs.  It’s a disastrous blunder: the aircraft is struck by lightning, and Torrance is forced to land the incapacitated plane, miraculously, on the small island of Jolo in the southern Philippines.

There are two casualties among the small number on board—one of the three flight attendants and a federal agent accompanying a prisoner, Louis Gaspard (Mike Colter), who’s being extradited on a murder charge.  Gaspard survives, unscathed but still handcuffed, along with Torrance, Dele, chief flight attendant Bonnie (Daniella Pineda) and a junior colleague, and a small number of stereotypical passengers, the most notable of whom is the obligatory smarmy businessman (Joey Slotnick). 

With no way to communicate with the outside world about their location, Brodie volunteers Gaspard—who turns out to be ex-Foreign Legion!—to accompany him in search of help.  Unbeknownst to them, the island is controlled by a brutal militia group headed by a greedy rebel named Junmar (Evan Dane Taylor), whose modus operandi is taking foreigners captive to ransom them.  Though after reaching a dilapidated facility Brodie’s able to get through a call to his daughter to give her some information on where they are (after a company operator dismisses him as a prankster), he’s interrupted by one of Junmar’s thugs, leading to a protracted, nasty fight that naturally ends in Torrance’s survival.

He and Gaspard now have another mission, because in their absence the remaining crew and passengers (save for a couple that wind up dead) have been taken prisoner by the militia.  They have to be rescued.  Fortunately, Daniele has gotten her dad’s message through to the Trailblazer crisis team, and Hampton (Paul Ben-Victor), the company’s owner, and Scarsdale (Tony Goldwyn) the ex-Special Ops guy he’s called in as an advisor, send in an extraction team headed by macho Shellback (Remi Adeleke).  The newcomers and plane survivors are able to return to the downed aircraft and attempt an escape from Junmar and his followers.  A prolonged standoff results, and it’s hardly spoiling things to say that all winds up in the way Oscar Wilde once described fiction—the good end happily, the bad unhappily.  But naturally it’s a close thing, with plenty of felled bodies and a final rush to satisfy everyone waiting to see the Junmar get his just deserts.                   

The scenario concocted by Charles Cumming and J.P. Davis is absurd, of course, but Richet stages it with aplomb; he, cinematographer Brendan Glavin and editor David Rosenbloom even make the on-board chaos during the storm pretty harrowing, though Mailara Santana Pomales’ production design is just average and the effects are only medium-grade.  The propulsive score by Marco Beltrami and Marcus Trumpp reinforces the frantic action.  Butler, along with Liam Neeson, is the present-day go-to guy for such fare, and he acquits himself as the audience surrogate with his customary combination of gruffness and empathy, selling both Brodie’s physicality and his fatherly concern.  Colter seconds him well as the—of course—wrongly accused prisoner-turned-hero, and is accorded a suitably upbeat sendoff.  Of the others An and Pineda are agreeable, Slotnick suitably irritating, and Taylor genuinely despicable.  Goldwyn is obviously having a grand time playing the smooth, hard-as-nails Scarsdale. (With character names like Torrance, Scarsdale and Hampton, perhaps the screenwriters just checked some maps to decide on them.)    

Action movie junkies will get their money’s worth from “Plane.”  On the other hand, those who don’t care for such stuff may prefer to crack open their Blu-Ray copy of “Airplane!” for another viewing instead: fewer thrills, but more intentional laughs.

Producers: Alexander Glehr and Johanna Scherz   Director: Marie Kreutzer   Screenplay: Marie Kreutzer   Cast: Vicky Krieps, Florian Teichtmeister, Katharina Lorenz, Jeanne Werner, Alma Hasun, Manuel Rubey, Finnegan Oldfield, Aaron Friesz, Rosa Hajjaj, Lilly Marie Tschörtner, Colin Morgan, Marlene Hauser, Johanna Mahaffy and Alice Prosser   Distributor: IFC Films

Grade: C+

Elisabeth of Bavaria, who became the wife of Hapsburg emperor Franz Josef I in 1854 and remained empress until her assassination by an anarchist in 1898, has been the subject of numerous films and television series, most notably Ernst Marischka’s Austrian “Sissi” trilogy of 1955-1957, which made Romy Schneider a star playing the young Elisabeth.  But there have been many others, from the 1920s to the present—the Netflix series “The Empress” being a notable current example.  So is Marie Kreutzer’s film, for which Vicky Krieps won one of the top acting awards at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.

In chronological terms, “Corsage” is one of the most limited of the films about Elisabeth, theoretically covering only a single year, from the end of 1877 to December, 1878, though Kreutzer’s script is free about what it assigns to those twelve months.  That’s characteristic of the writer-director’s audacity, since she’s less interested in presenting an accurate biographical account than in using Elisabeth as an example of how a woman, even one of the highest status, is often stifled in expressing her real self by the social conventions imposed on her gender. 

It’s also in effect a tale of mid-life crisis, since it begins in December, 1877, with the celebration of the empress’ fortieth birthday (which, a doctor reminds her in an attempt to convince her to act less recklessly, marks the average lifespan for women in the realm).  Her marriage is hardly the youthful romance depicted in the “Sissi” films, and she’s struggling to maintain the glamorous image that has always been hers in public.  (That struggle is symbolized by frequent scenes of her ordering the corset she wears beneath her clothes to be tightened to emphasize her supposed slimness—the motif that gives the picture its title. The metaphor is not a subtle one.)

Kreutzer offers scenes involving the rather frosty relationship between Elisabeth and Franz Josef (Florian Teichtmeister), a stern, condescending fellow dismissive of her opinions on political and military matters while being observed in the company of a pretty young Viennese housewife (Alice Prosser), and others revealing tensions with her children Rudolf (Aaron Friesz) and Valerie (Rosa Hajjaj), both of whom are concerned about her behavior.  Her sister and confidante Ida (Jeanne Werner) worries about her as well, and even her most loyal attendants, like Countess Marie Festetics (Katarina Lorenz), are disturbed by her unusual orders.  

For one thing, she’s showing reluctance to “represent,” as her husband puts it—to appear in public in properly regal mode; she even does a false faint to escape the duty in one such case.  And her queries about Sarajevo annoy Franz Josef as impertinent.  (It will help viewers to know something about the emperor’s policies regarding Bosnia and Herzegovina in advance, since the screenplay alludes to them without explaining them.  The same is true of the empire’s absorption of the Kingdom of Hungary, and the contentions it caused—an arrangement mentioned fairly often but never explicated.)  Her love of masculine hobbies like horse-riding and fencing also sparks criticism. 

She also turns heads with her travels, which usually take her to places where she can enjoy dalliances with handsome men—her cousin King Ludwig II of Bavaria (Manuel Rubey), with whom she is extraordinarily close, or her English riding instructor Bay Middleton (Colin Morgan), whose friendship is a source of gossip.  Then there’s her decision to allow Louis Le Prince (Finnegan Oldfield) to try his innovative movie-making machine on her; there are periodic excerpts of films showing her showing off clownishly before his camera.

That’s just one of the many anachronisms Kreutzer indulges in; Le Prince’s earliest cinematic efforts didn’t come until a decade later.  And the score by Camille is certainly not of the period; it has a deliberately contemporary edge, and while including an occasional fanfare of the Austro-Hungarian national anthem is also augmented by modern pop songs at incongruous points.  Then there’s Elisabeth’s gesture in the middle of another boring dinner (there are so many scenes of eating here that the repeated clank of silverware on china is maddening, both to the audience and presumably to Elisabeth, who after all is trying to keep her weight down), when she suddenly gets up and leaves, giving the other diners the finger as she departs.

All of which, of course, is designed to universalize Elisabeth’s plight, portraying her as the embodiment of women who have been confined by patriarchal expectations throughout history.  Even her charitable work—visiting wounded soldiers only to share cigarettes with them, or infirmaries for women with mental disorders caused by the loss of children or the crime of adultery—shows a feminist bent.  (Compare the recent films about Princess Diana that emphasize her contact with AIDs patients as a sign of her independence.)  Even the elegant production design by Martin Reiter, costumes by Monika Buttinger and cinematography by Judith Kaufmann, which employ many actual imperial locations, occasionally insert visual anachronisms to emphasize that while set in the nineteenth century, the film’s preoccupations are not limited by the timeframe.

Nor by such concerns as pedestrian historical fact.  The climax, on a ship carrying Elisabeth on another of her journeys, flaunts the record to provide her with a flamboyant escape from the deadening demands her imperial role imposes on her.  One can read the episode as a dream if one likes, cancelling out the last twenty years of her life at a single stroke, but Kreutzer then tops if off with a end-credits sequence in which Elisabeth does a wild bacchanalian dance by the close of which she’s grown a very masculine mustache (though one not much more convincing than Franz Josef’s false whiskers).

By now it should be clear that “Corsage” is not intended to present an accurate biography of Elisabeth, but to employ her as a symbol of the suppression of capable women throughout history.  But while one can respect the intention behind Kreutzer’s reveling in the clichés of biographical drama while simultaneously upending them to deliver a feminist message, the stolid, lethargic rhythm that she and editor Ulrike Kofler bring to the exercise leaves the film feeling obvious and heavy-handed.   

Nonetheless “Corsage” has many virtues.  In visual terms it’s impressive, and Kreutzer elicits competent performances from all her cast.  The linchpin of the entire effort, however, is Krieps, who paints a portrait of Elisabeth that resists the romanticism with which she has ordinarily been depicted.  This empress is a woman worn down by the demand that she play a role she’s come to find distasteful, by the recognition that the youthful beauty she’s been fabled for has faded, and by the attitude of a husband who seems incapable of real affection, even when he crawls onto her bed.  Yet Krieps never appeals for a viewer’s affection; in her hands Elisabeth remains a rather cold, even unpleasant person, using others—her staff, her lovers, even to some extent her children—just she herself is used.  It’s an uncompromising performance, which challenges us to like, or even fully understand, her.

That’s an acting choice more audacious than Kreutzer’s overall conception turns out to be.