Months of hype came to a head last Friday as the one and only “Snakes on a Plane” slithered into theaters nationwide.
Thanks to Internet chatter, fan-based parodies and “so-bad-it’s-great” lowered expectations, “Snakes” was a cult phenomenon months before its release, a guaranteed brain-dead freak show of a midnight B-movie, light on plot, heavy on exploitative sex and gore.
And looming above all was the specter of Samuel L. Jackson, stumping on every talk show he could for months and months on end, talking up the silliness and fun of it all. The catchphrases. The songs. The re-shoots for the hard R rating. The Jackson-voiced e-cards and phone messages that you got from your nerdy friends then forwarded on to someone else.
You’d heard it all before you even saw the movie and knew exactly what to expect from it. All those expectations, good and bad, have been met in the final product: a gangly, infectiously amusing horror-action-comedy that makes no pretense about exactly what it is – an event built around a non-event, crap for crap’s sake, a celebration of all that is tacky, crass and mysteriously entertaining in every ’70s era monster-on-the-loose cheesefest you vaguely remember catching on local television in the wee small hours of a sleepless morning.
You know from the start where you stand with the film. Either you laugh at the opening montage of surfing and fun in the Hawaiian sun, or you don’t. Either you keel over laughing at the inexplicable motorcycle stunts that follow, or you don’t. If you don’t, this would be a good time to quietly exit the theater.
Sean Jones pulls his motorcycle to the side of the road, chugs a Red Bull and stumbles onto a murder-in-progress. As Jones watches from the bushes, white-suited Asian baddie Eddie Kim whips out a baseball bat and goes to town on the face of a hapless district attorney. A healthy squirt of blood and some unapologetically expository (“I’m going to L.A.!”) dialogue later, Sean is on the run, with Kim’s henchmen in tepid pursuit.
Entirely inexplicably, Sean’s situation is immediately and comprehensively understood by a hard-nosed FBI man named Nelville Flynn (played, of course, by Samuel L. Jackson), who whisks the kid into protective custody and plans to fly him to Los Angeles to testify against the nefarious Kim. “Do as I say and you live,” says Flynn to Sean, and if you miss this quote the first time, don’t worry. You’ll be hearing it again.
Unfortunately, the duo’s flight to the mainland is loaded down with every stock character and stereotype from the last 30 years of disaster movies. There’s a dim bulb rap star and his bonehead cronies, a rich career gal with a purse-sized dog named Mary Kate, an effeminate male flight attendant, a leering chauvinistic co-pilot, a horny young couple, a snobby Brit, a flailing hypochondriac, a couple of doe-eyed kids and, oh boy, a kickboxer!
Oh, and giant crates full of deadly snakes. Hence, the title.
Kim planted the snakes in a last-ditch effort to off Sean. A timer blows a fuse on the crate, and then the snakes are free to move about the cabin. Kim also planted pheromones onboard to make the snakes hyper-aggressive, or “snakes on crack” as Jackson muses midway through the chaos of trying to ward them off.
Ridiculous, gory mayhem ensues, with snakes of every conceivable variety hissing and biting and coiling their way from one fresh corpse to the next. There are snakes in a blouse, snakes in a purse, snakes in a microwave, snakes in a toilet bowl and snakes in a vomit bag. There are also snakes on and in places too raunchy and gleefully indecent to print in this humble article.
“Snakes” is schlock that knows that it’s schlock and revels in every trashy, absurd moment of its own excess. No joke is too stale, no grossout too vile, no plot twist too inane. And on its own terms, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
Consider an early scene in which two libidinous lovers cram into the plane’s restroom to make whoopee. They light up a joint, then the man rips the smoke detector out of the ceiling so the two can smoke and shag without interruption. A gratuitous sex scene naturally follows. But, alas, there’s now a hole in the ceiling big enough for, say a large poisonous snake, to slither through undetected, which it does, causing the two lovers to thrash and scream their way to horrible deaths, all in the name of a goofy “Mile High Club” joke made by two unsuspecting flight attendants just outside the door. Who can argue with filmmaking of that caliber?
Not silly enough for you? How about a music video over the closing credits? How about David Koechner wrestling an asp in the cockpit? Or how about the now infamous moment when Jackson operatically bellows the film’s profanity-laced instant catchphrase?
It’s safe to say that no one could have made “Snakes on a Plane” more embarrassingly enjoyable than Samuel L. Jackson. He’s less an actor here than a master of ceremonies, ushering the audience from one imponderable to another with a wink that let’s you know that he’s in on the joke though you can never be sure to what extent. He’s a blast, whether roasting snakes with a homemade blowtorch or finding time to romance a sexy stewardess. Or barking silly dialogue in that mock intense way that only he can, with angry lines punctuated by random shouting. For instance, “He KNOWS who you ARE!” or “Eddie Kim WILL KILL you!”
Occasionally, the fun gets mired down by dull ballyhoo about anti-venom and who gets to fix the burnt-out electrical system, but these diversions pass quickly. Also, the film can’t seem to help itself from devolving into all the usual airborne disaster flick shenanigans, replete with turbulence and a runaway drink cart. It doesn’t help that loss of air conditioning in the cabin is met with the same emotional detachment as loss of the pilot.
But these quibbles mean very little when “Snakes” is firing on all its unbalanced cylinders. There’s something refreshing and unpretentiously thrilling about its go-for-broke wackiness. Once the laws of physics and anything resembling reality and emotional truth are out the window, you just strap in and give in to the splendid insanity.
“Snakes on a Plane” is a blockbuster for the ironic set, an unapologetic guilty pleasure for the ages. If there’s a sequel anywhere on the horizon, whether it’s snakes on a train, on a bus, on a submarine or on a dogsled, this critic will gladly check his brain at the door and take the ride.