Collet-Serra: Non-Stop (2014)

All in all, Non-Stop is probably Liam Neeson’s best film since Taken, or at least the first film to really recapture the same steady, unremitting sense of purpose and conviction. Set on a translatlantic flight from New York to London, it’s about what happens when U.S. Marshall Bill Marks (Liam Neeson) finds his security network breached by a terrorist who threatens to kill one person every twenty minutes unless his demands are met. In many ways, it’s the definitive post-9/11 hijacking film, not just because of a peculiarly ingenious twist, but because it’s clear that this terrorist is no longer invested in the plane as an isolation chamber. Far from trying to cut off or even control communication with the ground, this terrorist is aware that the people on the plane are going to be sharing their experiences on social media, and watching it all unfold in real time on the plane’s television screens. Where earlier hijacking films focused on the terrorist’s efforts to extricate the plane from all networks of communication, here it’s just accepted that the plane’s already fully networked – in fact, it’s a critical part of the plan. Perhaps that’s why the direction’s so consistent and suspenseful – at times, it feels as if Collet-Serra’s trying to evoke the experience of being networked more than anything else, collapsing the limbic tides of social media into the wee small hours of air travel, the long, lonely shift of the air marshall. Certainly, there are are moments of explicit, visceral action, but, until the final showdown, they tend to be quite fleeting, or localised to micro-spaces within the plane, such as the toilet, or the cabin crew quarters. And even when the showdown does occurs, it’s not that carthartic – it doesn’t feel commensurate to the perfectly modulated panic that’s built over the course of the film, the dawning, subliminal awareness that something is not quite right. Part of the power of a film about networking is that it can afford to include great performances in incidental, almost accidental ways – and Julianne Moore makes one of the most understated appearances of her career, as a fellow passenger with a condition that means her heart might give way at any second. She’s determined to live life to the full, even or especially during the hijacking, but her condition also testifies to a general unease and malaise that’s become too dispersed to be assuaged by any single counter-terrorist gesture - the exact terror that drives this brooding, illbient mood piece.