.MOVIE LISTINGS | MOVIE REVIEW ARCHIVE | THEATER INFO Boo, Hiss Summer escapist fare has bite, but no brain. BY JASON BLAIR SNAKES ON A PLANE: Directed by David R. Ellis. Written by John Heffernan and Sebastian Gutierrez. Cinematography, Adam Greenberg. Music, Trevor Rabin. Starring Samuel L. Jackson, Julianna Margulies, Nathan Phillips, Bobby Cannavale, David Koechner, Sunny Mabrey, Elsa Pataky and Todd Louiso. New Line Cinema, 2006. R. 105 minutes. Samuel L. Jackson calls in for herpetological assistance in Snakes on a Plane. With its low-rent title and the promise of midair gore, Snakes on a Plane doesn't want you to think too much. All it asks is that you sit back, relax and enjoy the campy innuendo that's the hallmark of the soon-to-be-dead. That, and a few hundred sexed-up poisonous snakes. But the fact that it barely exceeds B-movie expectations makes Snakes a disappointment. Snakes is for people who see movies to avoid boredom, hangovers or heatstroke. Everyone else, go to the zoo. There are two struggles at work in Snakes, only one of which is interesting. The first is the vicious but fictitious battle between the snakes and the passengers and crew. That struggle ends when Samuel L. Jackson decides it must, because after all, he's Samuel L. Jackson. Even his bad moods have bad moods. The second conflict is more nuanced. It's the internal struggle the actors must be feeling as they attempt to survive the low point of their careers. Any hopes that this movie would transcend the "snakes vs. Sam Jackson" billing were quickly dashed during the opening scenes, an amateurish setup that left me wondering if any actual actors would be present. Nathan Phillips (Sean Jones), a surfer and connoisseur of sports drinks, witnesses a murder by Hawaii's most feared gangster, Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson). Phillips escapes by dirtbike, but before he can return to the restorative bosom of the North Shore, Kim's thugs are at his front door. No worries, because agent Neville Flynn (Samuel L. Jackson) has taken up residence at Philllips' back door, through which both men manage to escape. To take down the mob, Flynn need only escort Phillips to Los Angeles to testify. You don't need to be a zoologist to have a good sense of what goes down aboard the plane. The first to get fanged? A young couple having sex and smoking a joint in the lavatory, a twin offense that left me thinking: better a snakebite than an FAA interrogation room. Soon enough, it's pandemonium. There's a doctor, but there are snakes coming out of his mouth, which can't be a sign of good health. There's a dog, but what's a chihuahua to a python? Don't even ask about the pilots, who descend like zombies into the cargo hold at the merest flickering of the cockpit lights. Enter Flynn, who emits some memorable lines, many of which are struggling for a foothold on the Internet. Talk about your forked tongues. But Jackson, formerly the baddest man in Hollywood, isn't what he used to be. His last decent role was as Frozone in The Incredibles (2004). It seems like for every Changing Lanes (2002) we get Shaft (2000), xXx (2002) and S.W.A.T. (2003). I don't even count Jackson's Mace Windu, since I refuse to accept that the recent Star Wars trilogy exists. Watching Julianna Margulies submit to every flight-attendant cliché is painful, especially after her star turn in "The Sopranos" earlier this year. Margulies wears her uniform like a corset; she seems hardly able to breathe. At one point, she's almost whipped outside the plane when Flynn decides to shoot out a window. The idea is to flush the plane of every snake, sort of like rolling down your window at 35,000 feet to remove that pesky fly from your car. It's just one of a number of outside-the-box ideas that makes Snakes the most absurd action movie of the summer.
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