Snakes on a Plane

Snakes on a Plane (or SoaP, as it is being called) delivers exactly what it promises. It is cheesy, campy entertainment and you will know whether you will like it or not, even before the film starts.

The film's title is pretty much its plot. Samuel Jackson is an FBI agent escorting an eye-witness to a crime, from Honolulu to LA. The eye-witness has seen a mobster kill a lawyer and so the mobster has arranged for crates of snakes to be loaded on the plane and released when the plane is in mid-air. The passengers' leis have been sprayed with pheromones that make the snakes more aggressive and once they're out of the crates, all hell breaks loose.

Soap is a by-the-numbers disaster film and so is completely predictable. Once we've met the characters, we know exactly who will be living by the time the end credits roll. So the question is not who will die but how they will die and when. And with a variety of scary snakes, the director has a lot of options. Some of the deaths are pretty nasty but the director never makes us forget that we aren't supposed to take the film seriously.

The film helped me see for the first time, the concept of 'fans' in USA. Seeing a Tamil film with a big star the first few days is fun mainly because of the hero's fans. You may not hear most of the dialogs but you will get caught up in the festive spirit and enjoy the film, whatever your opinion of the hero may be. Hollywood has its own stars and superstars but the concept of fandom doesn't exist there. So seeing SoaP was a rather unique experience.

Outside the theater, a bunch of kids were playing with toy snakes and one of them was wearing a T-shirt with the film's name on it. Samuel Jackson's first appearance was treated with claps, with the loudest noise being reserved for his most famous line (which appears pretty late in the film).