Don't bother flying with Jodie Foster

"Flightplan" opens with Jodie Foster looking freaked out as only Jodie Foster can. Think "Panic Room," but with intensity. From its launching sequence on, I was happily engaged by "Flightplan," until the last third of the film, which left me less than thrilled.\nInitially I was impressed with how quickly the movie draws audiences into the unsteady mind of the protagonist, Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster). Pratt's husband has unexpectedly died, so she and her young daughter, Julia, are returning to America from Germany in order to bury him and live with Pratt's parents while they embark on the difficult healing process. It quickly becomes evident that Pratt's viewpoint is somewhat unreliable, that she is confused, perhaps even delusional in her grief-stricken state. Pratt and her family have been residing in Germany because of her work as an engineer, and she and Julia are flying on an impressively large aircraft she had a hand in designing. But Pratt's life takes another turn for the worse when six-year-old Julia vanishes while her mother is napping. Pratt frantically attempts to locate her little girl, but her efforts are impeded by the captain and crew who think she is overreacting or maybe even deranged.\nFoster plays her role well -- she is convincingly maternal and frantic as well as a believable strong, successful female character. The role of Kyle Pratt feels like it could have been written with Foster in mind. All the acting is decent, if not better. The best performance (aside from Foster's) comes from Peter Sarsgaard (now starring in "The Skeleton Key"), who plays one of Pratt's fellow passengers, Carson. Sarsgaard, who has an interesting sort of charisma, has had more interesting but smaller roles in "Garden State" and "Kinsey." \nI don't want to give away the plot by explaining what made the late part of the film suck so badly, so all I'm going to say about it is that it was disappointingly uninventive. Its handling of racial tensions was troubling and there was one sequence that went on far too long and should have been subtitled "Jodie Foster is so amazing." \nIn these days of Hollywood's post-9/11 cashing-in, there are plenty of "terror in the skies" type movies hitting the theatres. Despite my issues with the direction the film takes, I admit the in-air action of "Flightplan" was more gripping than "Red Eye"(though I'll take a movie starring Cillian Murphy over one with Jodie Foster any day, and anyway "Red Eye" is a little better overall). But ultimately, I would have been more satisfied re-watching "Con-Air"