Movie Review :: LMN’s Cabin Pressure

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Lifetime Movie Network’s latest ‘Stranger Danger’ movie, Cabin Pressure, gave us a lot of hope with the exciting trailers leading up to the premiere of the TV movie, quite possibly giving us a modern spin on the classic Airport series of movies. The filmmakers certainly seem to want to go in that direction with a number of highlighted passengers on the plane — of course, no big celebrity names like the movies had (but the little girl from Hallmark’s Double Scoop was the most familiar) — but the convoluted and ridiculously stretched out plot nearly grounds the whole thing.

Alicia S Mason stars as flight attendant Nora Grey, about to head out from a flight in Boston to her home base of DC, where her husband Daniel and daughter Jordan await. Checking in with Daniel before the flight, Nora wants to make sure the package just delivered is not seen by Jordan because it’s her birthday present. Daniel says it better not be a phone (it is, and it will become a plot point later). Daniel is preparing to make a business pitch with his partner to some new investors, so he leaves Jordan at home, and Nora gets on her flight where she and flight crew Jerry and Ariel are greeted by Parker, a fill-in for their regular team member. Jerry is not happy because he was basically hung over and if the other guy could call out, he should have as well. Meanwhile an assorted collection of passengers board the flight, including a very twitchy guy, a Hispanic man who never takes off his dark sunglasses, a young couple in love and not afraid of PDA, and a little girl traveling solo whom Nora makes sure to give special attention. When her seat is between two burly, sketchy looking men, Nora moves the girl, Mia, to the back of the plane closer to her station. The star passengers are a disgraced businessman named Miles, in handcuffs and on his way to DC to face federal charges for embezzlement, and his Air Marshal handler, Dale (a man who has not an ounce of humor or personality). With Ariel and Parker in First Class, Nora and Jerry take care of the economy class passengers and everything gets off the ground without a hitch.

It’s not long into the less-than-two-hour flight when Nora gets a call on her cell phone. A heavily modulated voice tells her to go into the lavatory and find a yellow bag (which we saw someone on the cleaning crew handling before the flight) under the sink. In the bag are two bottles of ginger ale, and Nora is instructed to give the passenger in seat 7E a cup of the beverage. Nora goes to check who is in that seat and she is surprised to see it’s Miles. It’s even more surprising that someone would be instructing her to deliver this drink to that seat since it was not the seat Miles and the Marshal were originally to be sitting. The caller gives Nora ten minutes to deliver the drink, which Miles actually happened to order (so the caller knows it’s what he likes to drink), but Nora panics and spills the liquid on Dale, which makes his already sour personality all the more so. The caller is not happy that Nora failed — which means they are on the plane and watching — and warns her again that if she does not accomplish her mission in the next ten minutes, something terrible will happen to her daughter. To prove their point, Nora is texted photos of Jordan taken from outside the house. Nora wants to call 911 (how exactly that would help while they’re 35,000 feet in the sky is not clear), but is also worried that she is constantly being watched. So she tries again, but this time she uses a canned ginger ale and adds some liquid medication from the first aid kit to the drink, hoping to just knock Miles out and make it seem like he’s dead. But Miles is already in a deep sleep and Dale is suspicious of her constantly bringing ginger ale while he can’t even get a damn creamer for his coffee. Miles finally wakes up and drinks the ginger ale, but immediately goes into what appears to be anaphylactic shock, unable to breathe. Luckily one of the other sketchy passengers happens to be a doctor, so he steps into action getting Nora to help force oxygen into Miles’ lungs while he goes to work with a epi-pen, shocking Miles back into a state where he can breathe again. But the whole thing just makes Dale even more suspicious of Nora. Having failed a second time, the caller sends a henchman to go after Jordan, but the girl figures out that ‘Kody’ is not who he seems and manages to first hide in the house, making it seem like she escaped out a window, and then does get out of the house … riding right past ‘Kody’ on her bicycle. Girl. You could have gone in any direction, and that’s the one you chose?

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At this point, Nora is about to fall to pieces, unsure of what is happening to her daughter and unable to call her husband without being detected by the caller on the plane. At one point she redials the number that’s been calling and walks up the down the aisle but no one’s phone is ringing (I guess she never thought that the caller might have the ringer on silent). She does see the twitchy guy in First Class fumbling with his phone and looking at her suspiciously, but it turns out he’s just been trying to turn his phone off because his wife keeps calling (he also has an accent of some European origin that knocks him out of the running to be the suspect). Next she rips the sunglasses off of the Hispanic man … and he was just sound asleep so Nora still has no idea who on the plane is calling her. The plane is making its final approach to Dulles and the caller gives Nora one more chance to serve Miles a ginger ale (they planned for this by providing that second bottle). Now we must ask, has the writer of this movie ever been on a plane? There is no serving of drinks while the plane is on its final approach, but Nora pours the beverage and walks up the aisle, holding it in the most ridiculous way possible. Before this takes place, Nora snatched a phone out of a passenger’s hand who was asking for a charger and makes the brilliant decision to call her husband (he’d been unreachable on his own phone because he was in the middle of his pitch) … on the birthday gift phone — which apparently Daniel’s partner had activated for him before the pitch began. Convenient! But she told Daniel what was happening and he ran out of his meeting to save Jordan, who managed to avoid ‘Kody’ (Jordan looked up the names of the employees of the phone company and saw that the person who was after her was definitely not the same Kody on the website — whose body was hidden under some tarps in the back of the phone company van) by riding into the woods. Daniel drove around and saw her bike and also headed into the woods to find her, unaware that the assailant was also lurking about just waiting for the right moment to strike. And strike he does, attacking Daniel, the two fighting violently like Jordan watches like it’s a WWE match, barely registering an terror or fear. Girl, pick up a heavy branch, kick ‘Kody’ in the jewels, do something to help your dad! Daniel gets the upper hand and is holding ‘Kody’s’ knife at his throat. Jordan calmy approaches and lays her hand on her dad’s arm, and he lowers the knife, letting ‘Kody’ escape. He calls Nora just as she is about to deliver the tainted beverage to Miles, but slaps it out of his hand before he can take a sip when she learns Jordan is safe. Dale has had it by this point and puts Nora in a choke hold, asking the other passengers if she ever offered any of them a beverage. They all confirmed she had not. She finally explains what has been happening and Dale takes her phone and dials the number that’s been calling her, telling the passengers to take their phones off silent mode and hold them in the air. But no phones are ringing. They finally hear a faint ring coming from the lavatory at the front of the plane. There is the phone with all of the calls to Nora shown, so her explanation is accepted by Dale. He calls his office and asks for agents to head to the airport and interview each passenger as they disembark the plane (something the young lovebirds are ready to fight about because they don’t want to miss their connecting flight — and it makes them sketchy now — but a stern glare shuts him up quickly). With everyone off the plane, Nora tries to gather herself but is confronted by the person who has been calling her, and it’s … well, we won’t completely spoil it for you but we will say it was our first guess very early in the story. Because it had to be (unfortunately it wasn’t our second guess, little girl Mia … that would have been awesome and elevated this to three stars for sure).

Cabin Pressure isn’t a bad thriller, but it falls short of being a great one basically because of some of the more ridiculous moments in the story. The sketchy passengers were obviously red herrings. There was also absolutely no reason to make the little girl such a prominent character as she added nothing to the plot (she didn’t even get to tell her cow jokes from Double Scoop) except to perhaps show how motherly Nora could be. But in an Airport movie, there always seems to be a young child traveling solo for the first time as a plot device to get the audience more engaged in their fate. And even though director Peter Sullivan keeps doing cutaways to the other highlighted passengers, none of them every really do anything to make us think, ‘yep, that’s who’s calling Nora.’ If you’re prone to motion sickness while watching a movie, be aware that Sullivan also loves to spin the camera around its subject. It’s pretty neat that he was able to do this while Nora was standing in the middle of the aisle of the plane with no room for a camera operator to moves in a circle, so it must have been done with a drone (there is a similar shot with Daniel and Jordan), but it could also induce nausea in the viewers. Sullivan does manage to build tension in that confined space, but Connor Jamieson’s screenplay really stretches our credulity to its limits. It’s never really clear who wants Miles killed or why. There are some news voice-overs at the end that attempt to explain things, so perhaps there was a fear that Miles was going to rat everyone out to get his sentenced reduced. Either that or it was someone from whom he embezzled a lot of money and wanted retribution. Also, it would have probably been pretty easy to figure out who was using the phone in the lavatory because everyone seemed to notice how many times Nora went to the one in the back of the plane, so anyone facing forward should have seen the caller going into the one in the front multiple times. It might have made more sense if the calls were coming from the cockpit, that way no one would have been seen, but there’s also a crew in there so that would have been a tough one to pull off (unless the caller incapacitated the crew — and I secretly hoped Mia would have had to land the plane like Karen Black in Airport 1975 … again, that would have boosted this to a three star movie). There are attempts made to try and divert your suspicions elsewhere, making you keep track of who is in Nora’s vicinity when the calls are coming in. (And if you’ve ever seen the theatrical film Red Eye, writer Jamieson borrows heavily from it, to the point that you could believe the list of plot points were fed into ChatGPT, which then cranked out the script for Cabin Pressure.) In the end, it is still entertaining, you just have to be willing to go with the flow.

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Helping to make the story more engaging is Alicia S Mason, who survived the god-awful The Wrong Marriage (although adding Vivica A. Fox as the pilot so she could come out at the end and say, ‘Girl, you’re on The Wrong Flight’ would have also been a three star moment), turning in a nice performance as Nora, needing to exhibit a certain amount of stress throughout most of the movie while also projecting a calm demeanor so as not to alarm anyone around her. She makes us root for her, feel her complete helplessness in the situation, wanting her to make the right decision for herself and her family. She is a really engaging actor and we hope she will find some better stories to show off her talents. Christopher Sky does a good job as dad Daniel, a man trying to do better for his family by starting a new business, but also willing to put his own life, and career, on the line to save his daughter. Sophie Woods perfectly plays the precocious Jordan, making her feel like a real newly-minted teenager around her family, but she does not pull off the scenes in the woods where she should be in total panic very well at all. She literally just stands in place, watcher her father and ‘Kody’ fight. Frozen with fear? The director should have given her some motivation, coaching, something to make her appear as more than a spectator at a bare-knuckle bout.

Everyone else around her are stuck playing stereotypes. Joseph Nicholson is the sassy, gay flight attendant (with a sketchy mustache), Ashley Brinkman is the overly concerned and perhaps inadvertently condescending flight attendant, Sam Schweikert is the wide-eyed newbie flight attendant. Sofia Shakarian plays the wide-eyed, innocent young girl naturally, but her character really amounts to nothing. Marcos James is the Michael Myers-like ‘Kody’, a wordless, unstoppable force in a jumpsuit. Garon Grigsby is the always unpleasant Marshal Dale. His demeanor is so disagreeable, I wouldn’t have gotten that coffee creamer for him either. Besides Nora, the only really sympathetic character on the plane is … Miles, of all people. Jon Briddell actually plays Miles with a certain amount of humility, doing all he can to avoid making a spectacle of himself, hiding his handcuffs as best as he can. He seems ready to accept his fate, and manages to make the audience feel some concern for his safety. Miles is essentially ‘the bad guy’ in the story, but Briddell’s performance makes him a bit more human than many of the others.

Overall, Cabin Pressure could have used more drama in-the-air by giving the red herring characters a little more to do than just sit there and look suspicious. The script could have been a bit more original, but it is lifted above mediocrity by Alicia S Mason, who makes the most out of even some of the more absurd moments her character faces. Not a great movie, but not a total dud, Cabin Pressure is entertaining in its own way, just don’t think to hard about the plot.

Cabin Pressure has a run time of 1 hour 27 minutes, and is rated TV-14.