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Movie #21 was Relasyon by Ishmael Bernal, starring Vilma Santos and Christopher De Leon. Relasyon is a feminist movie that

If you saw the trailer or even just the poster for the new Liam Neeson action flick Non-Stop and you said to yourself, “Aha! Taken On A Plane!” you would not be that clever. Everyone thought the same thing, and everyone is correct. Once again, Liam Neeson must kill or maim large numbers of people in order to save his daughter. In this case, replace “daughter” with “150 passengers and crew on a flight from New York to London”, but the daughter connection remains in the form of a departed child and a little girl traveling alone. Of course it’s silly, but as in the Taken flicks, Non-Stop works because we can believe that Liam Neeson will save us all. In fact we want Liam Neeson to save us all: the plane hasn’t even taken off and his seatmate Julianne Moore is already pawing him. Lady, wait till you’re in the air at least.

You read that right: Julianne Moore. Apparently the plane that Federal Air Marshal Liam Neeson boards is en route to the Oscars (well, the Baftas) because brisk escapist fare like this doesn’t usually have such a stellar cast. Apart from Moore, who doesn’t have an Oscar yet what an injustice, that’s Lady Mary Crawley from Downton Abbey serving drinks and complimentary peanuts and making everyone feel proletarian. Corey Stoll the hot unfortunate congressman from House of Cards is a New York City cop, the lovely Linus Roache is the captain, and Scoot McNairy from Argo is a passenger. They even have some guy who looks like Alfonso Cuaron. And Lupita Nyong’o wins the inflight cabin carpet as she inevitably does, even if she has only three lines in the entire movie.

Anyway someone is threatening to kill a passenger every 20 minutes unless the airline transfers 150 million dollars to an account that turns out to be in Liam Neeson’s name. The villain is framing Liam for the hijacking, which means that he thinks Liam is an idiot because why would the account be in his name, but which shows that Liam’s bosses are the idiots because they actually believe it, which proves the villain’s point. The movie is very entertaining, though unlike the Taken movies we can’t cheer when Liam kills a bad guy because we don’t know who the bad guy is exactly. The big surprise is that Non-Stop was not produced by Luc Besson, but it’s still a French co-production, directed by Jaume Collet Serra (Unknown, Orphan).

Liam can do flawed-yet-fundamentally-decent-man in his sleep, and he can’t help but look noble (Ever see Rob Roy?) so we never believe the frame-up. It’s great that the 61-year-old man who played Oskar Schindler is the biggest action star on earth right now, but when is someone going to do a Fidel Castro biopic so Liam can star in it?

This is Fidel Castro in 1959. Photo from Wikipedia.