Denzel Washington owns the screen in Robert Zemeckis' Flight, a
“sobering” portrait of alcoholism and the agonizing journey
towards making that all-important first step towards recovery:
Admitting there's a problem.
Airline pilot 'Whip' Whitaker has such
a drinking problem. We first meet him downing beers and snorting
cocaine the morning of a passenger flight to Georgia.
A mechanical malfunction (a frequently alluded to “act of God”)
causes the jet to nosedive into the much talked about crash sequence
that whitens knuckles and stretches physics. Even though he's bombed
on vodka and cocaine, Whip manages – in a gambit only an
intoxicated man would dare attempt – to invert the plane and glide
it upside-down in order to restabilize in time for a crash landing.
For the time being, Whip is a hero for saving 96 of the 102 souls on
board, but when toxicology reports emerge indicating his drunk
condition at the time of the crash, he becomes the subject of a
criminal negligence investigation that drives him even further to the
bottle.
