When I’m picking movies to watch on the plane, I often gravitate toward stuff that is a bit “lower-brow”…in other words things that I can watch and hopefully enjoy, without necessarily being demanded of too much in terms of my intellectual and emotional engagement. In other words, I want stuff that is going to spoon-feed me some diverting entertainment.
Now recently, I did a short trip to and from Thailand (from and to Perth, where I live). On the way there my flight was largely in the middle of the night, so I didn’t watch anything. But on the way back I managed to squeeze in four different movies (the last one completed while we were taxiing on the tarmac). So how did I do at my airplane-movie goal? Was a diverted? Was I unchallenged? Let’s see.
Incidentally, it’s taking me forever to write this post as the last few weeks have been extremely busy and I’m basically behind on everything, so we’re going to make this quick.
But before we proceed, I just want to say it’s hilarious that I ended up watching two movies on this trip about derailing trains.
Anyway…
Some Spoilers
Dirty Angels
My first port of call was an action thriller by director Martim Campbell (Casino Royale, etc) and starring Eva Green (Casino Royale, etc). The story is about a group of mostly female soldiers who have to go into Pakistan disguised as humanitarian aid workers into order to rescue a bunch of girls who have been taken hostage by ISIS. I was hoping with the talent involved and the outlandish nature of the premise that the film would deliver some cheesy high-octane thrills, but the whole thing was clunkier than I wanted it to be. I never really bought Green’s character (the team gritty leader), and I never connected with most of the supporting cast either (Reza Brojerd as one of the team’s local allies was maybe the most entertaining). The action sequences were competent but unsatisfying–although that might not have been the movie’s fault: it was heavily edited on my flight, which resulted in a conspicuous lack of explosive payoff to much of the build-up. It didn’t stop the movie from showing us a bunch of the girls at the school that ISIS attacks at the start from getting thrown off the roof, so I’m not exactly sure what the censorship standards were.
The Commuter
Next up was The Commuter, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, is one of a long string of Liam Neeson-led high-concept action films. In this one, Neeson plays Michael MacCauley, a former police officer turned insurance salesman who finds himself unceremoniously fired after years of faithful service. With his family in great need of finances for his son’s college tuition, he is perfectly situated for the bizarre offer he receives on his commuter train ride home: figure out which passenger doesn’t “belong” and put on a tracker on that person’s bag. For this, he’ll get a whole boatload of dough. Of course, the people making the offer (whose representative is played by Vera Farmiga, who shows up for a few minutes before being relegated to a voice on the phone) know more about Michael than he feels comfortable with, and eventually prove their unsavouriness by killing one of Michael’s fellow commuters and kidnapping his family. Michael has only the length of the train ride home (an hour or so) to either figure out who the mystery passenger is or to find a way to turn the tables on the people threatening him.
It’s all breezy and entertaining fluff of course. The movie does give an explanation for what is going on but it defies credulity to think that this was really the easiest way for the bad guys to get what they wanted. But Neeson is fun to watch as ever and the movie certainly provides for a diverting 105 minutes on an otherwise boring flight. Alongside Farmiga, the film also features appearances by Elizabeth McGovern, Sam Neill, Letitia Wright, all in tiny but significant cameos. Patrick Wilson plays Neeson’s former partner in the police who seems like the one person that our hero can trust, which of course inevitably means that the guy is working with the bad guys in a movie like this (he is, and it’s revealed in one of the sillier ways available to the filmmakers–by conspicuously identifying a quirky saying that an unseen villain has said previously, and than by having Wilson’s character say that same thing, as if it’s some sort of big twist.
Incidentally, the train line that MacCauley is riding on is supposed to be the Metro-North Hudson Line that in real life goes from Grand Central Terminal in New York City to Poughkeepsie. I know this because it’s the train I took all the time (and still do when I’m in New York) to go from Peekskill, where I grew up, to Manhattan for work or whatever. The movie’s version of this train is nonsense. It skips lots of the real stations while stopping in a variety of places that the real train never does–for instance at 86th street in Manhattan, where the internet tells me the train used to stop at but hasn’t actually done so since 1901. It terminates at Cold Spring, which is actually a few stops before the train really ends in Poughkeepsie. And there is one car that we see where the passengers’ seats are on the opposite sides of tables, which I have never seen on a Metro-North Hudson Line train in all the years and years I have ridden them.
The Patient
The Patient, from 2025, is a film I’d never heard of, which seems to be pretty unknown beyond myself as well since I could find almost no information about it online, and no images from it in my usual sources for such things. It doesn’t help, I guess, that it shares its title with a better known series starring Steve Carrell. But this didn’t keep me from enjoying it, at least in limited, specific ways. It’s well shot and well edited, but on an obviously limited budget with a premise that is gripping but ultimately ludicrous.
The most obviously silly part of it is the goofy lengths the bad guys will go to get what they want, which dwarfs even what is seen in The Commuter. In this case they are after an SD card from a nature photographer’s motion-activated camera which happened to capture evidence of a murder being committed by some high-profile Senator.
What the baddies are willing to do to get this footage is put the guy in a fake hospital and try to convince him that due to brain damage from an accident he is actually somebody else entirely. They hope to confuse him so much that he will give away where he hid this card. They do all sorts of crazy things to make him spill the beans, like make fake identification and make social media posts and even find someone to play the role of his fake wife (he’s not married). All of this even though 1) our main guy is never actually confused about his identity and 2) it turns out the footage everyone is after is already loaded onto the internet and all he needs to do is send an email to make it public.
The Patient is from 2025 and directed by Mukundu Michael Dewil. Ryan Philippe plays the titular patient, and is fine. I don’t know the rest of the cast with the exception of Kate Beckinsale, who has an extended sequence in the middle as a creepy hypnotherapist. The movie has the sort of premise that might hold up for half an hour or 45 minutes, but is hard to sustain over a feature film. But even so, I did enjoy watching it. It’s well shot and well edited, and I definitely wanted to know how things would turn out.
Pets on a Train
This is a French animated film that had the better title of Falcon Express in much of the non-English speaking world. It’s directed by Benoît Daffis and Jean-Christian Tassy about a raccoon named Maurice (who likes to call himself “Falcon”) who is tricked by evil badger to give him remote control of speeding train so he can get revenge on a police dog named Rex who sent him away to the pound for five years. Yes, in this world, animals get sentenced to the pound for prison terms that they have to serve. Anyway, Hans tricks all the people into exiting the train and then forces it to travel at high speeds toward a bridge that will collapse under the pressure. Realising he’s been double-crossed (he thought Hans was helping hi steal food), Maurice has to free a whole assortment of pets, including Rex, who are packed away in a particular car and help guide them to the front of the train where they hope to pull of some technical wizardly that will save all their lives.
Because of the raccoon main character and because that guy is someone who most of a menagerie of animals really admires and respects, but then realize he’s less trustworthy than they imagined, the movie reminds me a lot of Over the Hedge, except less slick and with less famous people in the cast. It took me a while to get me to care about its characters, but eventually I gave in to it’s silly premise, and had fun seeing how the animals were going to survive, how they were going to defeat Rex, and how the obnoxious human newscaster hoping to benefit from the story were going to receive their comeuppance at the end. And in these areas, it did not disappoint.
The movie also had quite an amusing meta-joke running through it. Two of the many animals that feature int he cast are a turtle and a clownfish that want to be movie stars (they had appeared together in a commercial or something). Other animals encourage them from time to time that they will get there. Their names are Leo and Momo, and here they are.
Clearly they are meant to resemble Marlin from Finding Nemo and Leo/Leonardo from Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles (Leo even has the mask). It thought that was kind of funny.
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
