Review: 'Plane' is a brawny, but often brainless, throwback to the airplane disaster dramas of old

Like most movies that have the name Gerard Butler above the title, the action thriller “Plane” is, like the characters Butler usually plays, tough and single-minded and not always that bright.

Here, Butler plays airline pilot Brodie Torrance, who’s flying a late-night run from Singapore to Tokyo. His co-pilot, Samuel Dele (Yoson An, the romantic lead in the live-action “Mulan”), is new to Brodie, giving screenwriters Charles Cumming and J.P. Davis room to lard up on backstory: How Brodie is Scottish (saving Butler the work of affecting an unconvincing accent), flew with the RAF, and is a widower with a college-age daughter, Daniella (Haleigh Hekking), waiting in Hawaii for a New Year’s Eve reunion.

The plane soon is loaded up with Brodie’s personal story, the flight crew and 14 passengers — one of them a handcuffed fugitive, Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter). Brodie and Dele put the plane in the air, and right into a storm that Brodie warned the flight officer in Singapore would be trouble. When lightning hits the plane and knocks out the computer-run flight systems, Brodie has to crash-land, and finds a remote island in the Phillippines. Only two people die before the landing: A flight attendant Brodie knew, and the air marshall chaperoning Gaspare.

On the ground, lead flight attendant, Bonnie Lane (Daniella Pineda), tries to get the passengers organized, while Brodie and Dele look at the maps and figure out where they are. They realize they’re on an island not controlled by the Philippine government, but by a group of separatist rebels whose No. 1 hobby is taking foreigners hostage and killing them when they don’t get their ransom demands. Brodie picks Gaspare — who has military training — to help find a way to contact the airline.

At the airline’s corporate offices in New York, the CEO and his crisis team is working to find the plane and minimize the public-relations fallout. At this point, the CEO (Paul Ben-Victor) says in a very important voice — and I swear I’m not making this up — “Get me David Scarsdale.”

David Scarsdale — played by Tony Goldwyn because Lloyd Bridges is no longer with us — walks in, starts ordering people around, and declares that the only way to get the passengers and crew home safe is to send in mercenaries with lots of guns and a bag of cash to pay off the rebels. This is the closest thing the suits in New York have to a plan, and because some studio executive thinks it’s time to reboot the “Airport” franchise, that’s what they do.

Of course, this being a Gerard Butler movie, Brodie has another idea: Shoot, stab or beat up every rebel he sees. Gaspare can’t talk Brodie out of this plan of attack, so he joins in the mayhem.

French director Jean-François Richet, who made the 2005 remake of “Assault on Precinct 13,” stages some passable action sequences, with a lot of handheld camera work to make the action seem more jittery and exciting. The problem is that it takes a long time to get to the meat of the action, leaving Butler in unfamiliar territory: Trying to act like a human being, rather than the one-man wrecking crew the audience paid to see. The result in “Plane” is a bloody action movie that’s as generic as its title implies.

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‘Plane’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for violence and language. Running time: 107 minutes.