Streaming Spotlight by Cindy Summers
Plane – Prime Video
Pilot Brodie Torrence (Gerard Butler) was a bit of a maverick as far as commercial pilots go and was piloting a flight on New Years Eve from Singapore to Hawaii with plans to see his daughter who was attending school there. The crew included co-pilot Samuel Dele (Yoson An) and the flight had only 14 passengers, one of which was Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter) who boarded the plane in handcuffs with a marshal for a fugitive extradition.
They flew through a storm and got hit by lightning causing the plane to loose power. While going down the turbulence killed one flight attendant and the marshal, and they eventually crash landed in a remote jungle area called the Jolo Islands. Having seen something that indicated Gaspare was ex-military, Brodie took his cuffs off and had him accompany him back to a building they had flown over while leaving co-pilot Dele with the rest of the passengers.
They got to the building and Brodie was able to rig a phone and called the corporate headquarters of his airline, but the woman who answered said that she had been getting lots of prank calls and didn’t believe it was actually him and hung up. He called his daughter and told her that they had crashed and that she needed to contact the airlines but the call was cut short so he was uncertain how much his daughter heard. They found some guns and also a truck outside that they used to return to the passengers and the plane.
A villager saw the plane go down and told the leader of the village who gathered a small army and headed toward the plane. They got to the plane before Brodie did and killed two passengers and took the rest hostage, driving away in a bus while Brodie and Gaspare had to watch helplessly nearby. The leader was Datu Junmar, who took the passengers to Dandulit village where they were kept in a warehouse to be taken on a boat down river. Brodie didn’t want to wait for help as he felt the passengers where his responsibility, so he and Gaspare headed to the village.
Back at airline headquarters they brought in a specialist named Scarsdale (Tony Goldwyn) who used satellite imagery to locate the plane in the Jolo islands in the Philippines. They came up with a plan to parachute in but that they would need assistance getting everyone out. Unfortunately there was no military on the Jolo Islands as it was run by militia and separatists and a dangerous area that not even the Filipino army would go into anymore.
Back at the plane several special ops military personnel landed in parachutes and found the plane empty, but found the note that Brodie had scribbled on a shirt in the cockpit to let them know where the prisoners were and what was happening. At the village Brodie and Gaspare quietly snuck around the village stealthily killing guards and made their way to where the passengers and crew were being held. They freed the passengers and crew and got on the bus at the same time the special ops team showed up.
After a gun battle they were able to flee the village and get back to the plane, but there would be no help to get them off the island for 24 hours so Brodie felt their only option was to return in the damaged plane. Due to the damage they couldn’t get above a few hundred feet so he asked to be guided to land on neighboring Siasi island. The plane was out of control as it tried to land on the runway with the wings tipping back and forth hitting the runway as well as the brakes and tires gave way, but Brodie was able to stop it at the very end of the runway rescuing everyone.
Rated: R (Violence and Language)
Runtime: 1h 47m
