In-flight films

Another quick rundown of the flicks I got to see on my last Etihad flights from Bangkok to Heathrow. Just shorties.

First up was Fast & Furious which was pretty good. This is the sequel the first film’s been after for all these years. Don’t get me wrong – 2 Fast 2 Furious was decent enough in a light-hearted way and Tokyo Drift was a half-decent sideways step. But getting the original cast back was the best thing they could have done and this immensely silly bit of car fun is worth the running time.

I then opted for Push which wasn’t quite so good. A nice premise – people with natural superpowers and a government agency trying to improve them by pumping them with drugs… which usually kill them. The superpowers fall under several labels and a lot of the “empowered” try to live off the radar so that the government can’t find them. The story does drag and there are so many holes in the plot that even Swiss cheese would get jealous. Dakota Fanning, though, once again proves she’s a pretty good child actor by not being annoying.

A change of planes and on to The Boat That Rocked which was so good it’s getting a full review (next post).

Final film was Outlander which was nowhere near as good as I was hoping for. Sci fi meets historical fantasy as a spaceship crashes in Viking Norway. Hitching a ride with the humanoid pilot is a rather nasty beastie intent on wiping out anything on two legs. It’s a bit of a mix of The Spaceman and King Arthur, Alien and a Viking Braveheart. Overall not too bad, but it just didn’t flow very well and was fairly predictable.