Critique: Film> Reviews.

David R. Ellis' Snakes On A Plane is a high-concept film that deliberately attempts to parody the guilty-pleasure, cheese-fest cult classics that many of us love. In other words, the movie-makers have deliberately created a horrible movie. (Yes, it's true, Hollywood really has run out of ideas.)

The title sums up the plot, with Samuel L. Jackson playing his usual willing-to-expect-any-role-offered-to-him self at the forefront. For every random kill from a snake, the ex-Shaft actor spits some hard-edged philosophy that is supposed to motivate the people to come together and overhaul the venomous creatures on board the aircraft ("I've had it with these motherfuckin' snakes on this motherfuckin' plane"). It's a horror/comedy with some uninspiring acting, plenty of cursing, and some horrible CGI effects.

Now, for a man that enjoys the good-bad fun that some movies bring, there's only so many times that I could watch these snakes kill passengers before I became incredibly bored. Snakes has the elements of a cheesy B-Movie, but I would've enjoyed the film's status a lot more had it not been so keen to relish the thought of its own garbage. I find that most of the fun comes from picking out the inadvertent bad points in a movie and wondering how the hell the movie editors managed to let them slip past.

Another reason to hate this film is its marketing. Rather than paying homage to the other High-Concept films that inspired its creation -- Alien, Predator and Jurassic Park are just a few examples -- Snakes was marketed as if it was a work of art for embracing our favourite action movie clichés. New Line Cinema suspiciously hid away the footage from critics so that they couldn't get an early viewing of this Internet-based phenomenon; when it was eventually released to a mass audience, it was as if they expected the audiences to come flocking and praise this hidden treasure for being so original with its unoriginality. They accepted us to laugh and be scared out of our wits by how ineffectively made this piece of trash is. Not only is this quite insulting to the film-goer's intelligence, it is incredibly irritating (to think I wasted one-hundred and five minutes of my life watching this).

The irony of Snakes is this: For all its attempts at parodying the lowly films beneath it, it still thinks its a cut above most -- it's one of the most pretentious movies that I've seen in quite some time. It neither deserves to be critically-acclaimed or to have the status of being a "so bad, it's good." Basically, this motherfuckin' film sucks.

(C) Andy Carrington, 2009.