Terror at 40,000 feet

MOORE AND NEESON. Team up in high-flying whodunit.

Like Denzel Washington in Robert Zemeckis’ “Flight,” Liam Neeson faces a credibility crisis in Jaume Collet Serra’s transatlantic nail-biter, “Non-Stop.” The strapping, 6’4” tall actor is appropriately cast as Bill Marks, a self-destructive federal air marshal who springs into action after receiving text messages from an unknown sender, who threatens to kill a passenger every 20 minutes—unless $150 million is wired into a secret offshore account!

The last thing Bill wants is to sow terror and cause panic midway into the seven-hour flight from New York to London, so he must trace the identity of his tech-savvy nemesis before the lives of 150 passengers are put at risk! Worse, he doesn’t just find a bag of cocaine in the lavatory—he also discovers a ticking bomb in it!

Just as he zeroes in on the identity of the culprit, the beleaguered air marshal is genuinely spooked when he’s told that the bank account belongs to—him! It doesn’t help that the authorities monitoring the incident on the ground have dug up his problem with alcohol, his daughter’s death and his recent discharge from duty after serving as a cop for 25 years. What’s happening here?

Nowhere to run

Serra’s engrossing whodunit slows down halfway through its storytelling and has loose ends that need tying up, but he creates an acute sense of claustrophobia as he frames Neeson against the many suspicious characters around him. With one red herring after another, there’s little room for error—and nowhere to run!

Even as “Non-Stop” is bereft of originality and a truly plausible motive (other than to concoct a fast-paced, trigger-happy thriller that does brisk business at the box office), the interplay that the production establishes among the suspects, including Bill himself, lends tension to the exposition, which benefits from the thespic tag team of the imposing Neeson and the hard-to-read Julianne Moore.

Who’s behind it? Is it the friendly frequent flyer (Moore) who sits beside Bill in business class? Or the pilot (Linus Roache), who’s suspicious of him? What about the computer programmer, the Muslim doctor or the jumpy flight attendants (Michelle Dockery and the sorely underutilized Lupita Nyong’o) who tend to Bill’s urgent needs? —Too many suspects, too little time.