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So an FBI agent is forced to take on a plane full of deadly snakes that have been released mid-flight by a gangster that is targeting a witness onboard. It's such a simple set-up and yet it provokes so many interesting philosophical questions from that one-sentence pitch alone. Mostly, what in the actual fuck are you talking about? You can see why the internet when fucking nuts for the movie before it was released, can't you. As far as films go, it sounds absolutely fucking perfect. I have the movie on DVD and only watched it the other day and yet from that one sentence alone I'm already trying to work out who I have to pay to be able to watch it again. I wonder how many other variations of that the writers had to go through before settling on their solid gold idea of snakes on a plane?! Squirrels on a tram? Too cute. Sharks on a tractor? Too surreal. Beaver on a chopper? Way too fucking sexy. But Snakes On A Plane? That is directly in the centre of the Goldilocks Zone of animals on a vehicle bullshit. At one point in the movie, a man goes for a piss during the flight only to have a snake spring up and bite him on his dick. How much more obvious do you have to make it that this film is appealing itself so directly the primordial part of a teenaged boy's lizard-brain? You have a phallic like creature biting a man on his dick as he travels in a giant metal penis in the sky. Snakes On A Plane is a great title but from that scene alone I wonder if its subtitle should have been Freud Was Completely Fucking Right You Perverts.
I recently wrote a blog on the film John Carter in which I mentioned that the actor Taylor Kitsch was the man that had been bitten on the dick here and that like a kid that had shat his pants whilst in school he would likely never live it down again. Not on my watch anyway. I tell people every single time I see him. I haven't seen Kitsch's tv show Friday Night Lights but I can tell you that if I had then I would have paused it whenever he was on screen to constantly remind you that he was once in a film in which he got bitten on the dick by a snake. “It's literally all I see when I look at him. “There's Taylor Kitsch the snake to the dick guy”, my brain will say. When I rewatched the film the other day I will admit that I was a little surprised to see that it wasn't actually him that got bitten on the dick but oh well. Too late to change how I see him now. Kitsch was actually the character that got bitten to death in the toilet whilst joining the mile high club with his girlfriend and so you can see how I might have gotten mixed up. Fuck it. Close enough. Although having never attempted to join the mile high club myself I did think that they were pushing their luck when they decided to strip off completely. Surely the fun of shagging on a plane is because of the risk and naughtiness of what you're doing and not because you want to have actual sex? Why are you stripping off? Are you going to light some fucking candles and start blasting out some Barry fucking White too? No. You're trying to fuck in a giant coffin-sized room in the sky and there's a queue of people waiting to do a shit into it after you leave. It's not sexy and so just crack the fuck on.
In honesty, I suppose the politics of this move haven't dated brilliantly over the last few years. There's a lot of gratuitous tit shots during this sex scene and there's a few uncalled for jokes regarding a male air stewards sexuality. At one point a child gets bitten on the arm which causes his hand to swell up to an incredible size, as a woman attempts to help by sucking on the wound to remove the poison. At which point a male character sees what she's doing and suggestively mutters, “that's what I'm talking about”. But I mean what the fuck is he talking about? I can see that it's a woman sucking on something, but the thing that she's sucking on is a little boy's arm. How is that even remotely sexy? What is this? Jeffrey Epstein's private fucking plane. And why is the kid even letting her suck on his arm? Here's my advice to anybody in his situation. If you get bitten on the arm by a poisonous snake and your hand swells up then just accept that you're going to die and have one final wank. Teenage boys will sit on their hand for fucking hours to get it to feel as numb as this kids must right now. My granddad died of cancer and there was no way that this could have been used to aid a wank and so in some ways this kid doesn't know how lucky he is. Not that any of this is hugely lingered on of course because the second the snakes do decide to start attacking the film never lets its pace slow down enough for you to question anything. “How did the snakes even get on the plane?” I hear you ask. Well, that's dismissed with one brief line of dialogue in which somebody mutters, “security wouldn't have been able to detect the snakes being brought on board because they're cold-blooded”. But why the fuck would their temperature matter? Who was the baggage handler for this plane? The fucking Predator?!
Of course, none of this movie makes any sense the second you apply even the most basic of logic. The snakes are hidden in the baggage section of the plane in a giant box that opens when a timer releases their door. If you know what plane the witness is going to be on and you're able to get a timer device onboard beforehand then why not just try a fucking bomb you fucking idiots? How many shit plans did the villains get through here before they decided to settle on having as many snakes as they could find try to bring down a fucking plane? If you know where the witness is going then just pay a smack-head to shoot him on sight when he arrives at his destination. They're horny snakes too by the way. The plane was filled with snake pheromones to get them all riled up meaning that on top of the dangerous animals and the explosive timer-lock the bad guys were also able to get an undocumented chemical onboard this flight too. Instead of snake viagra did they not just consider having the plane blast anthrax out of the fucking air-conditioning system? Oh, what? You're going to tell me that wouldn't work because airport security can detect anthrax? Oh well. I guess an exploding box of horny fucking snakes is the only option then. A lot of work has gone into this plan and yet every single part of it is beyond fucking stupid. A lot of the criticisms of the film on its initial release commented on how serious the film seems to take itself and its ridiculous plot when it should be having fun. But I disagree. I watched it the other day and every single time a character mentioned the snakes on the plane with a completely straight face I found it to be genuinely fucking hilarious.
Had the filmmakers set out to make an ironically bad film then I'd have been annoyed because that would suggest that they had awareness enough to just make a fucking good one. But to make an entertaining movie that's so fucking stupid and yet delivered so fucking unironically is almost an act of genius. It's as though every single character is being played by Leslie Nielson in Airplane! It's just good fun. As the internet hype for this movie began to gain traction the filmmakers started to take advice from the fans and began to add their suggested shit in and it's so obvious when watching it. So much of this movie seems to have been inserted in after the fact that it's like watching an experimental arthouse film in which the cast have had their performances edited in after filming them at home on their fucking iPhones. But there were five days of reshoots allocated to the film with one being dedicated to having Samuel L Jackson utter his now infamous line and let's be honest and say that it's fucking brilliant. Snakes On A Plane might not be anybody's favourite film but when all you want is a little bit of escapism you can do so much worse than popping this into the DVD player and screaming, “I've had it with my motherfucking brain in my motherfucking head”. Thanks for reading and see you next time, motherfuckers.
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