Movie reviews: Suspenseful thriller Non-Stop

If you’re planning any transatlantic flights in the near future, do yourself a favour and avoid Non-Stop (12A). On board a routine flight from New York to London, undercover Federal Air Marshal Bill Marks (Liam Neeson) receives a text message informing him that unless he arranges for $150 million to be paid into a specified bank account in the next 20 minutes, a passenger will die. The threat appears to be emanating from inside the plane, but how is Marks to discover the guilty party without causing a potentially lethal panic? What follows is a tense, stripped-back thriller steeped in paranoia and twists. Jaume Collet-Serra’s pacy movie is as streamlined as the jet liner speeding along at 500 miles per hour, and while co-star Julianne Moore’s function appears to largely involve popping up on a regular basis with a raised eyebrow to remind the audience of how preposterous the tale is becoming, it’s all hugely enjoyable. Neeson plays more or less the same role he has carved out for himself in the last few years, the all-action one-man army he played in Taken (2008) and Unknown (2011), with the difference here being that Bill Marks is a man who has no visible enemy to target. The movie asks questions about how much we can take airline security (and by extension, US national security) at face value when potential terrorists are indistinguishable from innocent civilians, but most of the fun to be had here is in watching Neeson prowl the claustrophobic confines of the airplane like a wounded bear, growling and snarling and trying to do the right thing in the face of insuperable odds.