Flight Of The Phoenix

A technically impressive but dramatically uneven remake of the 1965 near classic of the same name, The Flight of the Phoenix sees Dennis Quaid upping his stoic levels of resilience to almost superhuman levels. He plays Frank Towns, a pilot who has to fly an embittered oil drilling team - including cardboard cut-outs played by Miranda Otto, Jacob Vargas, Hugh Laurie, Kevork Malikyan - out of their Gobi Desert HQ after their station is shut down. Caught in the middle of a huge sandstorm, their plane crashes, hundreds of miles from civilisation. However, after days of waiting for rescuers to arrive, one of the survivors, an egotistical nerdish chap called Elliot (Giovanni Ribisi) claims that he can get the survivors out if they do exactly as he says.

All surface gloss with little depth, The Flight of the Phoenix never adequately articulates the sheer horror of the situation that the survivors find themselves in. While the 1965 original concentrated its energies on detailing fading hope and encroaching madness, John Moore's flashily directed remake doesn't appear to ascribe much importance to character or atmosphere, preferring to shroud everything in an energetic but rather pointless bluster. By the time the film eventually rolls around to its overwrought conclusion, you'll most likely be wondering what precisely the point was.