Butler is Captain Brodie Torrance, a Scottish commercial airline pilot whose recent bust-up with a rowdy passenger has seen him demoted to the New Year’s Eve long-haul flight from Singapore to Tokyo that no one else wants to do. It’s a motley crew: another pilot and some flight attendants, plus just 14 passengers, including a murderer who is being transported between prisons in handcuffs. “Is he dangerous?” Brodie asks nervously. You bet he is, although not necessarily in the way you think.
When the plane is hit by a lightning storm, Brodie is forced to use his considerable bravery and flair to land in a Filipino jungle. Where, naturally, they have no way of communicating with the mainland and are surrounded by rebel forces with a history of taking foreigners hostage. There’s only one solution.
And yet there’s something joyous about the simplicity of a film like this, with its not-especially-clever dialogue and cardboard cut-out characters. It’s the kind of movie that was around a lot in the 90s/Noughties, but not so much now, where special effects and ever smarter twists must be roped in to keep audiences on their toes.