Flight - Disappointing Character Study

*** 1/2 out of *****

Running time: 138 minutes

MPAA rating: PG-13 Drug and alcohol abuse, language, sexuality, nudity, and an intense action sequence.

Director/producer/writer Robert Zemeckis has been responsible for some of the most entertaining, visually innovative and dramatically satisfying films of the past 30 years, from Used Cars and 1941 to The Back to the Future Trilogy, Romancing the Stone, Forest Gump, Cast Away and Beowulf.

Sadly, his newest effort, Flight, which stars Denzel Washington as an alcoholic airline pilot, fails to satisfy on any creative or dramatic level.

Beginning with the picture's misleading advertising campaign, and continuing right through its one-dimensional examination of a self-loathing drug and alcohol addict's attempts to come to grips with his life's failures, Flight never succeeds in portraying the fears, personal failings and utter moral bankruptcy of the central character.

This is one of the year's most disappointing films.

James Delson attended NYU film school, studying under Martin Scorsese and William K. Everson. He has been the film and television critic for WFUV-FM, WNYC-FM, Omni, Psychology Today and Fantastic Films magazines. He assembled an extensive private library of film research materials, numbering over 2,000,000 clippings which he used to prepare for 600 in-depth interviews with many of the most important filmmakers of the past four decades. Delson became the country's first computer gaming critic in 1983, his reviews appearing in Scholastic's Family Computing magazine. He donated his reference collection to the Museum of Modern Art where it was incorporated into their Film Study Center. Since 1984 he has owned and operated The Toy Soldier Company, which offers its vintage and current toys through a monthly catalog and an on-line website: www.toysoldierco.com.