Jodie Foster's latest mistake, Flightplan, comes out today. For those of you who have already seen and disliked TheForgotten or Air Force One, stop reading now. If you liked either of these two, you will love her newest addition to the kidnapping/hostage/conspiracy theory genre. 

Foster stars as Kyle Pratt, an engineer who has helped to design the engine system on a brand-new 474 jet. Pratt and her six-year-old daughter, Julia (played by cute-but-creepy Marlene Lawston) are flying back to the United States from Germany after her husband dies when he falls off their Berlin roof. Pratt's life becomes even worse, however, when she wakes up after a short doze on the flight to find her daughter missing. Even stranger is that nobody on the plane saw her daughter get on. Is she crazy? Is something bizarre going on? Do we even care?

Sadly, the answer is "not really." An exceedingly gaunt Jodie Foster ("She looks like Michael Jackson," said the bearded man sitting next to me in the theater) presents an unrealistic portrayal of a troubled widow. Foster, who we all know is capable of making better cinematic decisions (that was her in Silence of the Lambs, was it not?), has picked another doozie. As the plot wears on and the crew informs her that her daughter was never on the plane in the first place, Pratt starts to have to consider the possibility that she is actually going crazy. Foster expresses this change by pulling back her hair and looking around a lot with her huge blue eyes widened as far as they can possibly go. It's a valiant try, but no cigar. Entirely unhelpful is Marlene Lawston as her daughter, who spends most of the time staring at Foster with a creepy look on her face (think "I see dead people") and uttering uninspiring one-to-two-syllable words like, "Whaa?"

One of the biggest problems is the plot holes you could fly a plane through. For instance, in the very first scene of the movie, Pratt is tucking her daughter into bed in their Berlin home and gets up to close the curtains, when she sees two men staring in through the window from across the courtyard. Creepy? Yes. Foster then goes on to wrongly accuse two random passengers on the plane of being the peeping toms, only to have them vehemently deny it. So who was it? Well, we do not know. I know for a fact that I was not the only one bothered by this; the girl sitting behind me on the bus back was complaining the whole time about "those stupid staring guys. Who were they anyway? And like… why were they staring? Were they just like, randoms? Or were they like, secret government officials?" Good questions, bus girl. Unfortunately, we'll have to find the answers ourselves, since the plot certainly doesn't clear any of it up.

A running theme throughout the movie is its negative and ignorant portrayal of Middle Eastern men as hijackers and terrorists. "We have half the plane believing there are Arab terrorists trying to hijack the plane!" stage whispers one of the real hijackers halfway through the movie, "this is priceless!" Apparently it did not occur to writers Peter Dowling and Billy Ray that they could have been slightly more sensitive to the implications of their writings, but this particular topic failed to register on their radar as inappropriate.

The supporting cast offers a small ray of sunshine – Peter Sarsgaard (Garden State, Kinsey) presents a welcome shoulder to cry on as the plane's air marshal, Gene Carson. Carson's squinty-eyed manliness is a source of comfort to Pratt in her state of anxiety ("It's my job to protect everyone on the plane from anything that could be dangerous to them," Carson tells Pratt. "Women with imaginary children count"), especially since the rest of the crew could care less whether she finds her daughter at all. Sean Bean (The Lord of the Rings, Troy) also presents a convincing authority figure as Captain Rich, the distinguished British captain who must calm down his passengers while facing the reality that there may be a crazy woman/hijacker/general uproar on his plane. For those who enjoy awful scary movies, Erika Christensen (Swimfan) makes an appearance as one of the completely useless flight attendants.

With the exception of a few hilariously out-of-place sexual jokes, the script is generally boring and weak. Foster's lines do not add to the script at all, but leave the viewer wondering, "Why?" The plot is pretty much just a big mishmash of unanswered questions and plot themes, none of which leave the viewer really wanting to find out more. While the nail-biting previews may draw in an impressive first-weekend box office crowd, this is not one to tell your family and friends about.

Editor's Note: Erika Christensen's name was originally published as "Helena Christensen."

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