Bill Marks is a U.S. Air Marshal and ex-alcoholic who works non-stop to forget the death of his daughter. One night, while on board of a plane that is flying over the Atlantic Ocean from New York to London, he suddenly gets threatening text messages on his secure phone: the unknown messenger is threatening to kill one person every 20 minutes unless 150 million $ are transferred to a certain bank account. When one of the pilots gets poisoned and dies, Bill tries to use the help of a passenger, Jen; a muslim doctor; an NYPD officer, Austin and flight attendant Nancy to find out whom among the passengers is the criminal. Worse still, the FBI suspects Bill is the hijacker himself, since the bank account is on his name. Finally, the real perpetrator is revealed to be Bowen, whose father died during 9/11 so he wants to cause a bomb explosion on the plane to raise the awareness of the public. Luckily, Bill stops him and the plane lands safely in Reykjavik.
A surprisingly well done film, this is one of those 'minimalist thrillers' that intend to play out the entire story set out only on limited location, in this case a plane flying over the Atlantic Ocean, and manages to make it suspenseful and engage the viewers until the end. The director Jaume Collet-Serra uses the repertoire of Hitchcock's similar thrillers "Lifeboat", "The Lady Vanishes" and "The Rear Window" to craft "Non-Stop", resulting in an intriguing 'kammerspiel' that slowly builds its suspense, luckily without cheap tricks or sudden jump scares. One of the most effective sequences is, remarkably, one of the most quites ones at the same time: it is the almost 5-minute long sequence without any dialogues, in which Bill is walking across the plane and reading the disturbing text messages from an unknown villain that appear on the screen of the film, and which threaten to kill someone on the plane every 20 minutes unless 150 million $ are transferred to an unknown account. Other details are good, as well (a flight attendant looking at every passenger on the screen, circling out several of them who are texting on their mobile phones while Bill is simultaneously exchanging text messages with the villain, in order to try to narrow their search for the bad guy to several suspects), whereas the story flows smoothly, though some of the supporting characters are underused (Juliane Moore's character, for instance). This is an interesting 'whodunnit' mystery, almost set up as one of Agatha Christie's stories on a plane, especially since many characters are presented among the passengers, yet the villain is revealed only at the sole end. Unfortunately, the finale of "Non-Stop" is terrible, since the villain's motivations and actions make no common sense, since a bad idea cannot be compensated by good acting, no matter how good the actors are, and thus such insane ending reduces the high impression of the film and takes its toll.
Grade:++
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