Lifetime's second movie showing last night was considerably better than their first: it was "Turbulence," a.k.a. "Flight 192," written and directed by Nadeem Soumah, and, despite some pretty preposterous plot twists, it was played for suspense rather than shock and worked better on all levels than "Under the Bed." Sarah Plummer (Dina Meyer) is the head of a major department in the FBI's Los Angeles office; her husband Ken (Nick Baillie, a considerably better-looking man than usually cast as the male leads in Lifetime movies!) built a small IT startup into one of the world's major computer companies; and when the story begins their 12-year-old son Jacob (Cole Carter) is about to play in the finals of his school's baseball team's annual competition. Only Sarah gets called to Washington, D.C. on the eve of the game because she has to take over the case of Senator Johnson (Brent A. McCoy), a sixty-something scapegrace legislator bearing a striking resemblance to the older Fred Astaire. It seems that Johnson, whose wife has lost all interest in him and spends all her evenings getting drunk on the vintage wines she collects, went out to a party with a bunch of hot 20-somethings and got one of them to get into his red Corvette and let him drive her to a beach, where they frolicked in the sand but she drew back on actually putting out sexually for him. So in a bizarre combination of frustration and anger he strangled her and left her dead body on the beach. Only he was caught in the act by a nearby security camera which filmed the whole thing. The gimmick is the security camera footage is the only evidence against him — with it he's bats-burgers but if he can get it to disappear
So he calls in a sinister organization of "fixers" designed to help the super-rich and super-powerful out of jams like this, and its two members (at least the two we see) are Michelle Taylor (Victoria Pratt), a blonde with a chillingly off-hand affect who chats up Sarah on Flight 192 of the fictitious "AirPacific" airline, and Cameron (Justin Johnson, easily the hottest guy in the movie even though Baillie is better looking than the normal casting for a Lifetime husband). Michelle tells Sarah — and shows surveillance footage of her home to prove it — that Cameron is holding Sarah's husband and son hostage and will kill them unless Sarah goes into the FBI database and erases every copy of the damning surveillance video. There are several problems with that — including the fact that the FBI would back up something like that up the ying-yang and wouldn't give one agent, no matter how high up in the hierarchy, access to all the extant copies; also the FBI originally got the video from the Los Angeles Police Department, and one would think the LAPD would retain its own copy, especially since despite the FBI's involvement it's still a murder committed within Los Angeles's jurisdiction. Nonetheless, despite the far-fetched aspects of some of Soumah's plot, he directs the film effectively and gets some great suspense effects — he even manages the rare feat of making work on a computer dramatically interesting. "Turbulence" is a quite good thriller, not especially interesting in terms of social comment but fun as sheer entertainment and generally well acted by heroes and villains alike.
Review of Turbulence
