Captain Brodie Torrance (Gerard Butler) is flying a commercial airline from Singapore to Tokyo on New Years Eve when a lightning strike takes out their electronics forcing a crash landing on a remote island off of the Philippines. 

The passenger list numbers less than twenty people but does include Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter), a man being extradited for murder. Whilst the island they have landed on is run by a separatist militia that makes it dangerous for all of them. 

Of course our hero pilot is desperate to find his way home to his daughter and to return his passengers to their families. He releases Louis from his cuffs and they head out to find a radio. The passengers are promptly taken hostage and then Brodie and Louis set out on a rescue. 

Plane is a genuinely odd and perfunctory title for what is very much a generic B-movie action thriller. Perhaps the plan was to use that as an advertising strategy to get people to pay attention or perhaps they just really struggled to come up with anything better. Either way, Plane is still very much the generic B-movie action thriller you would expect. 

Gerard Butler does everything you would expect him to. He is gruff, cheesy as hell and capable in the action stakes. The scenes in the air are relatively tense and exciting. You know the plane will crash but they still make it an enjoyable ride for those safely in the seats in the cinema watching. The weaker links come in with Mike Colter’s Gaspare and the action editing on the ground. Gaspare is meant to have a mysterious past and seemingly should sit in a moral grey area of a bad man doing the right thing. Unfortunately he is so underwritten there is nothing to cling onto and Mike Colter can not breathe any life into him. Whilst the gunfights on the ground should be exhilarating but quite often become a flurry of bullets that you can not quite place where they are coming from or going to. 

Overall it is just about fine but Butler has done both better and sillier in the last few years.