Snakes on a Plane Review: An Instant Cult Classic
I was laughing, the girl next to me was cringing. That’s the best summarization possible for Snakes on a Plane. But if that’s not enough information, let me elaborate. The cult phenomenon that is SoaP (yes, even the movie’s acronym is funny) is nothing extraordinary. The script is very basic and has more clichÃ?©s than you can shake a stick at. The actors play their parts and overact when necessary. The CGI snakes are deliberately imperfect and the gross-out results of venomous fangs are rampant. By all movie-going logic, SoaP should have been torpedoed right from the beginning. And yet it works.
By now there’s no need to state how the movie was influenced by anticipating fans. For some generational reason, the name alone was enough for people to latch onto the premise, not unlike some of the snakes in the film. Well, there was less viciousness and more of a “this is going to be so bad it’ll be good” vibe, but you get my meaning. The result was explosive positive feedback for the dumbest of concepts.
Witnessing the brutal beating and death of a prosecutor in charge of taking down a mob boss while in Hawaii, a twenty-something surfer is convinced by a federal agent to testify in L.A. the mob boss catches on and executes a diabolical plan- kill the kid en route. From the title, you should be able to discern how he plans on killing the witness. Everything viciously and joyously goes to snakebite hell from there.
Truthfully, the movie is about as predictable as a straight desert road. But there’s a certain charm there that lots of other movies tend to forget. Lots of scripts make the mistake of trying to be one step ahead of the audience, or giving the main character too many “ah-HA!” moments to appear smarter than the average Joe. SoaP is so silly, it’s gone all the way around the bend and approaches intelligence from the other side.
Consider the character meant to riff on Paris Hilton. She’s so pampered, she asks if flying coach is safe the same way a tourist would question a route through the Projects. She’s inseparable from her dog, Mary Kate. Yet she’s never mean, shows no condescending attitude, and as the movie progresses you actually grow to like her.
That happens with a lot of the stereotypes. The martial arts guy is introduced, given his heroic five minutes, and is smartly placed back in the toy box before he overstays his welcome. The eccentric rap star may fall because of his Achilles heel, but isn’t a complete jerk. Jackson’s FBI agent is more or less Samuel L. Jackson with a gun, and apparently that man can do no wrong.
There is no message that needs to be pounded into the heads of moviegoers. Nobody working on the movie thought once of pulling the wool over the audience’s eyes. There’s no confusing technobabble, no complex mob politics, no science lesson on the Black Mamba. What’s left is a solid film filled with snakes biting every imaginable part of the human body, cringing at the gross-out special effects, and people like me laughing like crazy. You either get it or you don’t. It’s Snakes on a Plane, and it’s just that plain fun.
