German director Robert Schwentke (
Tattoo) takes this film to great heights during its take-off and cruises effortlessly through the first two-thirds of the flight, establishing engaging characters, a foreboding mood and a fantastic degree of intrigue and suspense, reminiscent of (Alfred) Hitchcock's best.
Unfortunately, for some bizarre reason, the film rapidly changes course on its descent, nose-diving to a crushingly cliched ending with Foster in a grey fitted-T replicating the white-singleted antics of Bruce Willis in
Die Hard. Quite what writers Peter Dowling and Billy Ray (
Shattered Glass) were thinking, we'll probably never know, but their climax not only threatens to ruin the suspense so painstakingly built earlier in the film, but also strangely echoes both Foster's previous starring role in