Ya Can't Ya Won't And Ya Non-Stop

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In the nearly ten years since he made all of our deepest dreams and desires come true by impaling Paris Hilton through the face with a lead pipe, director Jaume Collet-Serra has given me some of my favorite on-screen things. I could toss out examples from the Liam Neeson thriller Unknown (January Jones playing an icy bitch!) or the TV series The River (Thomas Kretschmann in a river! A monkey wearing a doll head!) or even Goal 2: The Dream Begins (Alessandro Nivola in teeny white briefs!) to prove my point, but really all you need is one word: ORPHAN. Orphan is everything! Orphan is everything spread on a cracker and served to me by Jake Gyllenhaal.

So needless to say, I look forward to Collet-Serra's new films. Non-Stop missed me in theaters though, so I'm only now catching up to it. Does it disappoint? Well everything not named Orphan 2: Esther's Reorphaning is bound to be a little bit disappointing, isn't it? But Non-Stop is a heckuva lot of fun anyway, even if it doesn't have any whore-dwarfs. (Then again, how tall is Scoot McNairy?) Neeson's really embraced his grumbling sly Franken-persona - from certain angles he's like somebody propped Lurch's skeleton up on-screen, and from other's he gives off the beatific glow of a half-tanked priest at a slumber party. Whichever way you look, it's totally something.

JCS knows well enough to keep it light and tight and to keep you guessing - clues rattle around the inside of that airplane like its a bingo cage, numbers and letters imprinted on every character's forehead. It's Agatha Christie's Die Hard - a round of Clue where the answer could be Lady Mary with a Blow-Dart in The Lavatory or Ernest Hemingway in the Luggage Compartment With a Bag of Cocaine. It's what the Aztecs called a good time.
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