Flightplan (PG-13, 2005)

Newly widowed Kyle (Jodie Foster) is transporting the body of her husband back to the States aboard a giant airbus that Kyle helped to design. With her is their daughter, six-year-old Julia (Marlene Lawson). Both fall asleep early in the flight. Kyle wakes up a couple of hours into the flight to find Julia missing. Though she tries to approach crew members and Captain Rich (Sean Bean) with respect, she's increasingly unnerved by their suggestions that she's worrying needlessly, and then that the girl doesn't exist. As the crew and passengers are increasingly turning against Kyle, she fights to find Julia.

As suddenly widowed mother and propulsion engineer Kyle Pratt, Foster provides a broad range of emotion. Practical-minded and self-contained in her grief, Kyle first appears in middream, walking with her dead husband through Berlin's snowy streets, wishing that she might stop him from ascending to their rooftop -- from which he fell or jumped. While it provides an apt showcase for the brilliant Jodie Foster and delivers effective tension in its early scenes, by the end, FLIGHTPLAN dissolves into clichés. But there are enough thrills to keep teens and adults interested.

But the movie never veers from Kyle's perspective, which means viewers believe her and suspect a plot. This is especially true when Air Marshal Gene Carson (Peter Sarsgaard) comes up with some completely inappropriate niggling: "Your husband's death is starting to make a lot more sense to me -- a couple more hours and I'm ready to jump." Right. With outrageous motivation like that, you're ready for the silly plot turns that turn Kyle into Action Mom.