SOAP Suds

Okay, I know you're dying to hear a review of "Snakes on a Plane" (SOAP).

First, if you're thinking about seeing this movie, make sure you go with a crowd. Like "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," this film benefits from a full house and audience participation. Half the fun is the group reaction to the campy, over-the-top scenes, cheesy dialogue and cheap CG effects.

Second, don't go expecting great art. Please re-read the last sentence in the previous paragraph. This is a bad movie, but a good-bad movie.

If you've been living on a mountaintop without Internet access for the last year, you probably haven't heard about SOAP. This movie got enormous pre-release PR in the blogosphere with several changes later made that were precipitated by consumer feedback. The studio responsible for the film wanted to call it "Pacific Air Flight 121." Bloggers and the filmmakers voted for the far more descriptive "Snakes on a Plane." Then the filmmakers went back and inserted a bunch of salacious/vicious scenes that raised the movie's rating from PG to R. Those scenes are easy to identify, ESPECIALLY the famous quote from Samuel Jackson: "I've had it with these mutha-f***ing snakes on this mutha-f***ing plane." That scene isn't even inserted smoothly, but the audience at our showing went nuts when he finally spoke the words.

There isn't much of a plot. Why do you need a plot when you have SNAKES ON A PLANE? Samuel Jackson, who did an enormous number of promotional appearances for this film was blunt, essentially saying: "What are the two things people fear the most? Snakes and flying. We put them together."

The plot, such as it is, has a young Kurt Russell lookalike who accidentally witnesses the particularly nasty murder of a D.A. by a gangster kingpin. (Note: I'm not giving the actor's or actresses' names. Samuel L. Jackson is the only star that matters). Jackson plays a FBI agent who, with his partner, is charged with getting the reluctant witness from Hawaii to L.A. on a red-eye flight.

There is the obligatory airport waiting room scene (first immortalized on film in the 1963 Liz Taylor/Richard Burton movie "The V.I.P.s"--I know my potboilers). There are the stereotypical characters: the Sean P-Diddy lookalike with his bodyguards (one of whom is Kenan Thompson from SNL), the Paris Hilton lookalike with a chihuahua in her purse and a cell phone at her ear, the honeymooning couple, a pair of adorable little boys traveling alone, the fat lady, the obnoxious businessman and an earth mother with her child in a sling. There are also two pilots and four cabin staff: an older woman, an overtly gay male, a sexy blonde and a woman working her last flight before going to law school. Hint: Don't bother getting attached to any of the characters. You'll regret it later.

Rather than shooting the witness, blowing up the plane, or poisoning the food, the gangster kingpin hits upon the perfect solution for eliminating his troublesome witness: expose several hundred poisonous snakes to pheromones to make them more aggressive, put them in a time-released crate in the plane's cargo hold and wave bye-bye to the flight.

The filmmakers don't miss any opportunity to have the snakes bite passengers/crew in creative ways. Women get bit on the breast, men get bit in an equally suggestive place, both sexes get bit in the eye, on the lip, on the ass, wherever.

There is the added attraction of Snake-O-Vision. You get to see the victims from the viewpoint of the eyes of the snakes (green, blurry CG).

The film is exactly what you would expect of a movie entitled "Snakes on a Plane." If you go with the right attitude, expecting horrible dialogue ("Time is tissue"), silly plot twists (You won't believe Jackson's solution for getting rid of the snakes) and obviously computer-generated snakes, you'll have a great time. I did.