From the Vaults: Blogorium Review - Snakes on a Plane

I did not like Snakes on a Plane.

Half of you are now saying "Gee, I'm shocked." with the sarcasm that just doesn't translate when typed, and some of you are probably saying "Really, but it has to kick ass!" with all of the enthusiasm of someone smart enough not to watch the finished product.

Oh, it's true; Snakes on a Plane could be a movie as dumb as its title, but it's not. This is the kind of movie that tries too hard to be a stupid action thriller, so instead of getting an Exit Wounds, we get a Half Past Dead. (for those curious, Exit Wounds was a Steven Seagal / DMX movie that was so stupid it was hilarious, but when they tried to do it again with Steven Seagal and Ja Rule in Half Past Dead, it was just stupid.)

Snakes on a Plane desperately wants to be Con Air with Snakes, and with a title as dumb as Snakes on a Plane, you try to convince yourself it is. But it's not. This is a movie that doesn't have the guts to amp the stupid up to 11, and instead hovers around 6 for most of the movie, throwing you the scraps of the kind of movie it should have been.

When I first heard about Snakes on a Plane, there was no Samuel L. Jackson attached to it, so I assumed it was a Steven Seagal direct to dvd movie (with the following ending: Seagal has parachuted out of the plane which explodes above him, and out of the explosion comes a snake, which he somehow does a mid-air kick to with his snake skin boots, and then says "That's what I call some hot snake on snake action." Roll Credits) but instead Sam "the Man" Jackson got involved, and everyone assumed that we'd have a movie of Dave Chappelle's Sam Jackson, all screaming and cursing.

Which would have been the movie they wanted to make, but even when they went back to get that R rating, it still doesn't work the way they planned it. Yes, he says "I'm tired of these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane", but it's so late in the movie and at a point where it just doesn't make sense to say it. It's not the beginning of an inspirational speech, or at least, it shouldn't be. But it is, so instead of Sam being the man and wiping the floor with snakes immediately before and after that line, we instead get passengers strapping in.

Snakes on a Plane looks like the retarded fun action movie that the Seagal's and the Van Damme's are more than happy to pump out four times a year, but instead it comes up short, making the only enjoyable part of the film the scene with Kenan Thompson and Sam Jackson in the cockpit, where the line "is it playstation or x-box" becomes unexpectedly hilarious thanks to the disgust in Jackson's voice. Sorry folks, this movie is bad, but not in a so-bad-it's-good way, just in a "boy, I wish Michael Bay had made this between The Rock and Armageddon.", because that's the movie you're looking for, not a watered down Passenger 57 with venom.

It was suggested to me that this movie is nothing without the proper audience, but since I saw The Grudge and The Ring 2 with the same "proper" audience (which is to say the screaming dimwits who are more excited than they really should be) and those movies still sucked, I sort of doubt it.

Thoughts from 2010: Strangely, when I think back on Snakes on a Plane, a movie I haven't given so much as a passing glance to since first watching it on DVD, I'm reminded of Hot Tub Time Machine. Both movies share a concept boiled down in a ridiculously under-complicated, tell-you-exactly-what-you're-getting title, and yet both films fail to deliver the absurd promises they make. Hot Tub Time Machine comes a little closer in execution, but I still think that it, like Snakes on a Plane, is a better movie in your imagination than it is in reality.