Snakes on a Plane (2006)
Rated R for language, a scene of sexuality and drug use, and intense sequences of terror and violence
Score: 3 out of 5
Snakes on a Plane is remembered to history as a case study in why you shouldn't rely on internet culture to promote your film. After New Line announced a film starring Samuel L. Jackson with the working title Snakes on a Plane, it quickly went memetic as people on the internet made all the jokes one could imagine about that self-explanatory premise. The makers of the film recognized and embraced the fact that their movie had become an internet meme, with a title change to the more boring Pacific Air Flight 121 canceled (at Jackson's request) and the marketing playing up how ridiculous the movie was going to be. A pop-punk tie-in single called "Snakes on a Plane (Bring It)" was recorded with a who's who of flash-in-the-pan mid-'00s musicians from Pete Wentz's Decaydance Records label. New scenes with added gore were shot to bump the rating up to an R. Then it was released, and... everybody ignored it, the film barely recouping its budget domestically; it would take international receipts for it to turn a profit. As it turns out, the internet's attention span is fickle, and by the time the movie actually came out after a year of in-jokes and memes, everybody had moved on.
Which is a bit of a shame, because, while it wasn't the absolute riot that was promised, it was still a fun mix of Airport and Anaconda, a killer animal/disaster flick that was light on plot and characters and a bit too leaden with dated CGI but still provided some decent thrills and chills. It is absolutely a relic of its time, without much going for it beyond camp and gore (this coming from the director of the second and fourth Final Destination films) and an overriding sense that it could've done more with the joke, but it leans heavily into those things such that it was able to sustain itself and hold my attention for a full 106-minute runtime. For better or worse, everything you need to know about this film is in the title.
The excuse to get to the title (i.e. the plot) is that an extreme sports enthusiast named Sean witnesses the gangland execution of a Los Angeles prosecutor by the notorious criminal Eddie Kim while he's vacationing in Hawaii. With Eddie's men after him, Sean finds himself under the protection of FBI agent Bad Mother Fu... sorry, Neville Flynn (Samuel L. Jackson), who is guarding him on a commercial flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles to testify before the court. Eddie, however, has an ingenious method of making sure that neither Sean nor the plane makes it to the mainland: unleash a swarm of venomous snakes on board, aggravated by pheromones to drive them hostile, in order to kill all the crew and passengers and cause it to crash in the middle of the Pacific.
The first act is spent introducing the main characters: Sean, Neville, the flight attendant Claire who's about to retire to go to law school, her co-workers on the flight crew (composed of the flirty young blonde Tiffany, the older woman Grace who's also about to retire, and the ambiguously gay guy Ken), the asshole co-pilot Rick, the rich bitch Mercedes with the yappy purse dog Mary-Kate (a parody of Paris Hilton), the germophobe rapper Three Gs and his bodyguards Troy and Big Leroy, the foreign woman Maria, and the kids Curtis and Tommy who are flying alone for the first time, and that's basically all you need to know about any of them. After the first act, there's virtually no character development, just a lot of snakes biting people and a bunch of gags related to such; these are people you care about more for their actors' personalities than for who they are as people. Snakes crawl out of, and into, every orifice. The first victims are a horny couple joining the mile-high club (the male half played by a pre-fame Taylor Kitsch), and the next one is a guy trying to use the bathroom who gets bitten on the dick. A snake gets thrown in a microwave and blown up while the guy who does it screams at it "yeah, who's your daddy now, bitch!?!?" The yapping dog gets swallowed in one bite by an anaconda, followed by the asshole who fed the dog to the snake to buy himself some time, because karma is a beautiful thing. When Flynn learns how the snakes, normally fairly docile and afraid of humans, have been turned into rage monsters using pheromones, he calls them "snakes on crack". And of course, there's the line that this movie was practically made for, when Samuel L. Jackson announces that he has had it with all the slithering reptiles aboard this aircraft -- in far more profane Jules Winnfield language, of course. After thirty minutes, the only actual plot concerns Flynn's fellow FBI agents in Los Angeles (led by Bobby Cannavale) trying to get antivenom for when the plane lands and trace the snakes back to the gangster Eddie Kim, and it takes up about ten minutes of the movie, tops.
In short, it's Sharknado on a bigger budget, with David R. Ellis putting his Final Destination experience to good use as the effects of venomous snake bites are shown in graphic detail, and as both people and snakes are killed in other creative ways. The CGI snakes were fairly dodgy more often than not, but against the backdrop of this film's B-movie atmosphere, and with the gore effects being solid, not only was I able to forgive it, but it kind of worked. The comedy was usually rather low-brow, but I was laughing pretty consistently. Like Sharknado, it felt like they knew what they were making and rolled with it, to the point of including lines that fans of the (idea of the) film had come up with. Unfortunately, this also wound up being the film's greatest weakness, as it ultimately felt too insubstantial for me to care all that much about the characters or their peril. A handful of attempts at drama were undercut by the lack of stakes and the jokey atmosphere of the film, such as when Elsa Pataky's character Maria was sucking venom out of the kid Tommy's arm in order to save him, only for Big Leroy, who had been non-fatally bitten on the ass by a snake, to wish that she'd do the same for him. It was an incredibly lightweight film, and while, to be fair, that was precisely where it wanted to be, it always felt like there was a much funnier version of itself laying just under the surface. The best joke would've been if, instead of making a winking, B-grade comedy, they took everything seriously and played it with a completely straight face.
In short, it's Sharknado on a bigger budget, with David R. Ellis putting his Final Destination experience to good use as the effects of venomous snake bites are shown in graphic detail, and as both people and snakes are killed in other creative ways. The CGI snakes were fairly dodgy more often than not, but against the backdrop of this film's B-movie atmosphere, and with the gore effects being solid, not only was I able to forgive it, but it kind of worked. The comedy was usually rather low-brow, but I was laughing pretty consistently. Like Sharknado, it felt like they knew what they were making and rolled with it, to the point of including lines that fans of the (idea of the) film had come up with. Unfortunately, this also wound up being the film's greatest weakness, as it ultimately felt too insubstantial for me to care all that much about the characters or their peril. A handful of attempts at drama were undercut by the lack of stakes and the jokey atmosphere of the film, such as when Elsa Pataky's character Maria was sucking venom out of the kid Tommy's arm in order to save him, only for Big Leroy, who had been non-fatally bitten on the ass by a snake, to wish that she'd do the same for him. It was an incredibly lightweight film, and while, to be fair, that was precisely where it wanted to be, it always felt like there was a much funnier version of itself laying just under the surface. The best joke would've been if, instead of making a winking, B-grade comedy, they took everything seriously and played it with a completely straight face.
The Bottom Line
A monument to the excess and mindlessness of the prior decade's pop culture, Snakes on a Plane, despite the implosion of its hype bubble, still holds up as the movie that it set out to be: a delightfully cheesy, rock-stupid horror-comedy that, for better or worse, wears everything on its sleeve. Ironically, I can see this one day, once the nostalgia cycle hits the 2000s, getting rediscovered and becoming the genuine cult classic that it tried and failed to be in its time.
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