by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Lifetime’s second movie
showing last night was considerably better than their first: it was Turbulence, a.k.a. Flight 192, written and directed by Nadeem Soumah (and if his
name is East Indian, as I suspect, he helps redeem Indian directors from the
bad taste left in my mouth from the terrible work of Tarsem Singh on last
Friday’s first episode of Emerald City!) and, despite some pretty preposterous plot twists, it was played for
suspense rather than shock and worked better on all levels than Under the
Bed. Sarah Plummer (Dina Meyer)
is the head of a major department in the FBI’s Los Angeles office; her husband
Ken (Nick Baillie, a considerably better-looking man than usually cast in the
“dicks in peril” roles in Lifetime movies!) built a small IT startup into one
of the world’s major computer companies; and when the story begins their
12-year-old son Jacob (Cole Carter) is about to play in the finals of his
school’s baseball team’s annual competition. Only Sarah gets called to
Washington, D.C. on the eve of the game because she has to take over the case
of Senator Johnson (Brent A. McCoy), a sixty-something scapegrace legislator
bearing a striking resemblance to the older Fred Astaire.
It seems that
Johnson, whose wife has lost all interest in him and spends all her evenings
getting drunk on the vintage wines she collects, went out to a party with a
bunch of hot 20-somethings and got one of them to get into his red Corvette and
let him drive her to a beach, where they frolicked in the sand but she drew
back on actually putting out sexually for him. So in a bizarre combination of
frustration and anger he strangled her and left her dead body on the beach.
Only he was caught in the act by a nearby security camera which filmed the
whole thing. The gimmick is the security camera footage is the only evidence against him — with it he’s bats-burgers
but if he can get it to disappear … So he calls in a sinister organization of
“fixers” designed to help the super-rich and super-powerful out of jams like
this, and its two members (at least the two we see) are Michelle Taylor
(Victoria Pratt), a blonde with a chillingly off-hand affect who chats up Sarah
on Flight 192 of the fictitious “AirPacific” airline, and Cameron (Justin
Johnson, easily the hottest guy in the movie even though Baillie is better
looking than the normal casting for a Lifetime husband). Michelle tells Sarah —
and shows surveillance footage of her home to prove it — that Cameron is
holding Sarah’s husband and son hostage and will kill them unless Sarah goes
into the FBI database and erases every copy of the damning surveillance video.
There are several problems with that — including the fact that the FBI would
back up something like that up the ying-yang and wouldn’t give one agent, no
matter how high up in the hierarchy, access to all the extant copies; also the FBI originally got the
video from the Los Angeles Police Department, and one would think the LAPD
would retain its own copy, especially since despite the FBI’s involvement it’s
still a murder committed within Los Angeles’s jurisdiction.
Nonetheless,
despite the far-fetched aspects of some of Soumah’s plot, he directs the film
effectively and gets some great suspense effects — he even manages the rare
feat of making work on a computer dramatically interesting — and his story
tests Sarah’s resourcefulness as she hacks into the FBI’s database to send a
warning that her family is in jeopardy and some action is needed. The warning
is received by Sarah’s second-in-command, Agent Peterson (Kevin Interdonato),
who is so nerdy and affect-less I expected it to turn out that he was in league
with the crooks and had supplied them with all the information they needed to
scope out Sarah’s family and take action against them. Instead Peterson is one
of the good guys and eventually catches on. There are some great suspense
scenes, including a neat reversal in which Michelle grabs Sarah’s FBI badge and
briefly manages to convince the personnel on the plane, including the pilot and
the air marshal, that she is the FBI agent and Sarah is a looney-tunes madwoman
disrupting the flight out of her own paranoia, as well as a climax in which
Jacob has taken his cell phone with him when Cameron moved him and Ken to a
secondary location and he manages to place a 911 call and leave the line open without
Cameron watching. With the phone on, the FBI can trace its location and
therefore rescue the Plummers — but the phone is running out of battery power
and the suspense is will the phone stay on long enough for the FBI to trace it.
The ending is a bit silly — with the warehouse where he’s holding Ken and Jacob
Plummer surrounded by FBI agents and police SWAT teams, and Cameron already
upset because he can’t reach Senator Johnson to receive new instructions,
Cameron nonetheless holds his gun on Sarah, who holds her gun on him, and he
resists her attempts to get him to drop the gun. Any real crook in a situation like this would eagerly agree
to rat out his higher-up for more lenient treatment, but that doesn’t seem to
occur to Cameron — or to Soumah. Nonetheless, Turbulence is a quite good thriller, not especially
interesting in terms of social comment but fun as sheer entertainment and well
acted by heroes and villains alike (except for Interdonato, whose nerdiness and
flat affect briefly fooled me into thinking he was in league with the
baddies!).
