The mindless joys of a January movie: In praise of M3GAN and Plane
Kenneth Rexach/Lionsgate; Geoffrey Short/Universal Pictures
It's been one of Hollywood's favorite punchlines for decades: January is the dumpster, the dregs, the Land-of-Broken-Toys burial ground for projects not quite good enough to slot anywhere else in a long year; the kind of movies you send a "U up?" text at 2 a.m., but never take to dinner.
So yes, this is where films like Escape Room 2 and Dirty Grandpa rightfully go to die. But the month also has its own scrappy low-bar charms, an underdog swagger born of no expectations and even less marketing budget. Back in 2009, someone made the mistake of kidnapping Liam Neeson's daughter and kickstarted a gruesomely enjoyable silver-fox franchise. (Three years later almost to the day, Neeson would turn his very particular set of skills on wolves and murder the winter box office once again.) Cloverfield came out in a January, and so did M. Night Shyamalan's lurid return to form Split; Paddington was a Capricorn baby, twice.
And so it is that only a few days into 2023, we were given a new heroine for our times: M3GAN, the kewpie-eyed AI with both serial homicide and So You Think You Can Dance baked into her code. She spins! She twirls! She sings Sia's "Titanium" because she is, in fact, made of various metals! And she will come at anyone who threatens, disturbs, or mildly inconveniences the peace of her young human companion, Cady (Violet McGraw), with the hair-trigger enthusiasm of Goodfellas-era Joe Pesci.
Geoffrey Short/Universal Pictures
Universal is said to have moved up the movie's release date after the internet collectively lost its meme-ing mind over the trailers, and reportedly also made edits in post to cater to a wider PG-13 audience, removing much of the midnight gore but keeping the TikTokable satire intact. Indeed, M3GAN works because it is patently bonkers — the first "scene" is a fake commercial that easily could have run on any recent season of SNL — and almost pathologically self-aware. But it also works because it wears its outrageousness lightly, and because Allison Williams, with her cool repose and Ivy League jawline, makes you believe: As M3GAN's workaholic creator, she's as real-world rooted as anyone trying to wrest control of the devil's own marionette could hope to be, and her hair looks glorious even when she's losing.
Plane (in theaters this Friday) makes no such fourth-wall winks at its audience, at least not explicitly. But with its blunt-force title — are we just down to flashcard nouns now? — and a logline even a badger could understand, the film seems to embrace its January destiny from the jump. And it turns out to be far better than any movie that involves Gerard Butler playing a man with no snakes on board deserves to be.
Butler is Brodie Torrance, a commercial pilot just trying to make it home from Manila to his college-age daughter (Haleigh Hekking) by New Year's Eve. The passenger list is minimal, a scant handful of sleepy tourists, bored businessmen, and one seething, malevolent dude in handcuffs (Luke Cage star Mike Colter) being repatriated to the States on an unknown murder charge. When weather forces them to lose all comms and land on a remote Philippines island run by militant separatists, hell breaks gratifyingly loose.
French director Jean-François Richet has made a sort of speciality of red-meat thrillers, including the cheerfully brutal 2016 Mel Gibson vehicle Blood Father and a stark, faithful 2005 remake of Assault on Precinct 13. He treats Plane like the ludicrous B-movie it is, but keeps his storytelling so lean that almost no moment feels wasted; all muscle, no fat, just the right amount of gristle. Butler's Brodie is tenderhearted but rugged, a lovable rogue who makes corny-cute dad jokes and is unfailingly chivalrous to flight attendants, but also looks genuinely pained when he has to kill. (One particular scene of hand-to-hand combat with a dogged mercenary is a marvel of grunting, concussed vérité.) Tony Goldwyn plays a suave fixer, at least one person literally loses their head, and the villain's death is a kamikaze chef's kiss.
Which is not to pretend that we have stumbled into some vortex of VOD Citizen Kanes: If Plane and M3GAN win any prizes, they will almost surely be of the people's-choice variety. (Historically, Oscar contention comes in this forsaken month only for the great foreign films that seem to land there with regularity; if that's your bag, both No Bears and Close should not be missed). But box-office gold feels like a fair reward for what these deeply silly, perennially disrespected movies give us — loony torchbearers for the pure unsnobbish love of cinema in all its forms. If any are blessed enough to get sequels, we wish them only Junes.
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