Snakes on a Plane is a creature feature/lesson nobody learned from the early aughts starring Samuel L. Jackson, Julianna Margulies, Nathan Philips, Flex Alexander, Sunny Mabrey, Byron Lawson, David Koechner, Bobby Cannavale, Bruce James, Kenan Thompson, and actually a lot of other people.
Sean (Philips) witnesses mob boss/Mortal Kombat villain Eddie Kim (Lawson) murder a prosecutor in Hawai'i. He's immediately scooped up by FBI Agent Neville Flynn (Jackson) and put on a plane to Los Angeles to testify against the notoriously slippery Kim. Kim, having exhausted all possible options - getting a bomb onto the plane, putting a dude on the plane to kill Sean, hiring a dude to shoot Sean in LA, NONE OF THESE WOULD WORK - arranges to have a special cargo of venomous snakes from all over the world on the plane, sprays the leis that passengers are given with a chemical to make them super-aggressive, and then sets a timer to open the cargo when the plane is at the mid-point of the journey. IT'S THE ONLY WAY.
The snakes are released, havoc ensues, many people are bitten and kitten in gruesome fashion, Jackson gets to the say the iconic line ("I have had it with these motherfuckin' snakes on this motherfuckin' plane!"), a passenger who's a fan of flight simulators (Thompson) lands the plane, everyone zooms down the "my fun day at Chuck E. Cheese" inflatable slide, it's glorious.
Snakes on a Plane is not a good movie. It was never meant to be a good movie. It was meant to be a cheesy horror movie with a perhaps original premise, and then the Internet got hold of it, and it because REALLY ALL-CAPS IMPORTANT that it was rated R, that the title stayed, and that Samuel L. Jackson got to refer to "motherfucking snakes." And so they did some reshoots, added some gore and some profanity, and in August 2006 it came out. I know because I was there. And here we get into the lesson nobody learned - people on the Internet who say "oh hey wouldn't it be funny if" do not spend money on the thing they think would be funny. Making memes and shitposting is free. Actually going out to a movie is not.
So ignoring all of that, let's look at the movie on its own merits! The biggest problem, I think, is that the most interesting characters in the movie are Margulies' Claire (a flight attendant on her last run before going to law school), Bobby Cannavale's Hank (an FBI agent recently out of the field who still craves the action), and Eddie Kim (a young, ruthless, criminal mastermind who's enough of a madman to concoct this scheme but organized enough to pull it off). Jackson's Flynn is entertaining, but we don't learn much about him other than he's from Tennessee and he's got a failed marriage, but he's played by Sam Jackson so we listen to every damn word he says.
Nathan Philips plays the hero/human MacGuffin of the movie, the hapless surfer Sean, and that could have been an interesting role. This is a kid who did nothing wrong, and is having his life upended because if he doesn't, he's complicit in Kim's violence, but now by agreeing to testify, innocent people around him are dying horribly. And that conflict should drive an arc, but unfortunately a) the role has no meat and b) Nathan Philips seems to have left his charisma in his other shorts. It doesn't help that he's just a schlubby white guy with no particular pizzazz, but honestly even a really exciting actor would have had trouble with the role. So you can kinda see why much of the action focuses on the passengers of the plane.
Like any disaster movie, we've got a colorful assortment of characters - the germaphobe rapper (Anderson), the rich and somewhat vapid woman (Rachel Blanchard) with the dog in her purse (alas poor Mary Kate), the sonofabitch that feeds the dog to a snake to save himself (Gerard Plunkett) and then is immediately eaten by a mutant anaconda, the lovely young woman (Elsa Pataky) with her baby who uses Foreign People Magic to save a little point (Daniel Hogarth) from a snakebite, and so on. The real stories in the movie live here, but they stay separate from Sean and Flynn for so long that the stories never really coalesce with the main plotline.
And then there's the snakes. Of course, you can't have venomous snakes on a set, so while there were a lot of real snakes used in the movie, most of the money shots were CGI, and um, it doesn't hold up. But get past that and focus on the snakes biting nipples, dicks, and eyeballs, and, well, it's a creature feature. Problems with effects are part of the tradition.
In conclusion, it's a perfect movie, 10/10, no notes, there's a plane, it's got snakes on it, boom.
My Grade: My first impulse is A, but it's more like C- if I'm honest
Rewatch Value: High
Next up: Sneakers
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