Snakes in a blog

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. I saw Snakes on a Plane last weekend.

How was it?

Well...

Here's the thing about SoaP. With a premise like that, and a title like that, it has to be a B movie. There's no other way it will succeed. Now, it can be a bigger budget, (relatively speaking), B movie, with better distribution than most, a la an Eight Legged Freaks or Tremors, but it's a B movie all the same.

The wrinkle is Samuel L. Jackson. Throw a A-list actor into a B movie, and where do you go from there? How do you proceed?

And then there was the advertising. This film took on a life of it's own all over the internet. Take that title + Sam L and you get pretty much what the internet was created for. The director/producers of the film even went back and reshot parts based on requests from the online community, turning the film from a PG-13 to a hard R, and including the now famous line, "I'm sick of these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!" Hell, I even spent a good part of one evening sending out personalized messages to people phones from Sam L. off the SoaP website.

But does the movie live up to the advertising hype? Unfortunately not.

Lost in all this advertising blitz is the fact that there's still 90 minutes of movie around one famous line. B movies, by definition, (or by MY definition, at least), need to be bad. And for me to enjoy them, they have to be "good" bad. I loved the shit out of the examples I mentioned earlier: Eight Legged Freaks and Tremors. They're good because they're not good in all the right ways. They're cheesy, they're stupid, but most of all they're fun.

That's what SoaP is missing, the fun. It's not terrible, by any means. And that's partly the problem. At times, it takes itself too seriously for a movie with that ridiculous title, and that's where it becomes bland. It needed to be over the top with it's silliness, and unfortunately it wasn't. The best scenes, not surprisingly, were the full on snake attacks, simply because they were so ridiculous.

Overall, I'd reccomend it as a rental, because there is enough decency there to maybe keep you entertained for a while, but it's not a rush to see it in the theaters movie.