This film entralls for most of its length, despite itself. The secret seems to be to keep the audience too intrigued, insulted or jumping out of their seats to let them worry about unlikely details. In an opening which has the unsettling quality of ‘Last Year in Marienbad’ with extra bumps in the night, Jodie Foster brings considerable acting maturity to the portrayal of a widow accompanying her husband’s body back from Europe to New York. I couldn’t work out why she was so irritating as the mother whose daughter goes AWOL on a jet plane; admittedly it’s a big one, and admittedly the child has shown a tendency to wander off, but it’s no wonder the captain, Sean Bean, is reluctant to put out search parties, especially as messages from ground control confirm what he suspects, that she is away with the fairies. She even has us doubting her, until she has an unmistakable sign (nod to Hitchcock) that her daughter was there all along. Why is it that we sympathise with the passengers when she takes the law into her own hands, fortified by an uncannily precise knowledge of every nook and cranny of the plane’s design? It’s one of those films where the coincidences pile on and yes, you give the benefit of the doubt – oh, so she boards a jumbo jet alone, in an apparently crewless plane, and has time to settle herself in a seat upstairs before the rest are allowed to follow, and yes, if the daughter is constantly preoccupied with something under the seat in front, maybe nobody would even notice she was travelling with a child. By hey, no appointments board, even if composed entirely of clean cut Sean Bean types, would pick Peter Sarsgaard to be in charge of security. However, by the time you realise that the whole story depends on a whole number of implausibles, it’s too late – you’ve gone along with it - trapped. Why is the mom so irritating? Unfortunately, the plot can’t allow much grieving time, and she comes across as cold. Grieving widow, we can accept, make up, hair and clothes all immaculate, even that she’s aircraft engineer who knows all the nooks and crannies; if you are the only one who believes your daughter is alive, you might very well turn off the lights to aid your search. Releasing the oxygen masks and making 400 people believe they are all about to face a horrible death goes a tad too far, as does the tame face-off, and the final lap of honour, not to mention the unnecessary machinery mayhem. As my companion leaned across and reminded me, ‘Those planes cost a lot of money’, and I was reminded her husband worked for BAAC. However, this is a movie, and this is America.