The man who
we will come to know as Cole (Anthony Montgomery) wakes up on
an airplane. He looks around, sees a few other people,
walks to the bathroom to wash his face and asks himself, while
looking pretty darned pissed off, why in the world is he on an
airplane? Cole will sport a mad-on throughout this
entire movie called 'Chariot'. Soon he is joined in
consciousness by Emily (Brianna Palencia) who might be pissed
off as well, but Briana Palencia has a mouth on her that was
mighty distracting so I'm not sure if she was mad or
not. Eventually they wake up the other five people on
the plane and begin the process of figuring out why they were
all unconscious, on an airplane, to destinations
unknown.
So Michael (Joe Nemmers), who by chance happens to be the
Secretary of Transportation, is freaking out. Aden (Ian
Sinclair), the IT Guy figures it is a straight up
conspiracy. The there's Genevieve (Michelle Sherill) who
looks to be the Connected Chick and we're betting she probably
has the real lowdown on what might be going on. Rounding
out the crew we have Belinda (Leslie Hippensteel) who is just
an ordinary housewife and Ra (David DaLao) who got immediately
KTFO'd when he came around because he was freaking was out the
worst.
The mystery remains, why were these disparate individuals
drugged and put on an airplane? Thanks to a conveniently
placed cellphone, because obviously no one here has theirs, we
have learned that the U.S. is under attack and it is looking
bad. Then we learn about the Chariot Program, a
government safety valve used in case of a dire emergency to
secure the most important people in our country and ferry them
to a secure location to keep them safe, and we here in the
United States, at this moment in time in this movie, are in a
the midst of a pretty serious emergency. Problem is, as
Cole mentions, that he as truck driver, Emily the housewife
and the few other people they have on this sparsely populated
plane can hardly be deemed as inexpendable. More
troublesome is that the predetermined destination for this
plane has been nuked, and the pilots have orders to go this
place come hell or high water. Oh, then there's the
random dead body in the bathroom complicating matters even
further.
The options
for our heroes are extremely limited in this situation.
The pilots are armed and will come out blasting if they come
out of the cockpit at all, and of course all isn't quite what
it seems. And ever since a certain day in September back
in 2001, planes flying around all willy nilly in our airspace
are generally frowned upon. It is not looking good.
Recently we have seen a number of these 'strange occurrences
on an airplane' films such as '7500' or 'Airborne' or
'Altitude', and why not, as it seems like a fairly simple and
inexpensive enough of a setup. Put some people on a set
that halfway resembles a fuselage, turn down the lights a
little bit to make things creepy, and now all that's left is
to craft a narrative that somehow fits. Now the
problem with those other films, was despite promising starts…
those movies kind of fizzled out to varying degrees as they
reached their conclusions, or their big reveal. I am
pleased to say that 'Chariot' did fare much better than those
movies, but it too had some issues maintaining its momentum,
and had an ultimate ending which I don't think is going to
please too many people.
As it starts out, director Brad Osborne plays his hand
well. We wake up with the character of Cole, we are
completely in the dark, as all of the characters are… are at
least most of the characters… we get the information as they
get information, the atmosphere is tense and the actors are
doing a fine job in bringing us into this rather unsettling
situation that they have found themselves in, as we experience
there confusion and frustrations right along with them.
Eventually we get to some of the reasons why these people are
stuck on this airplane, and while it is little out there, it's
not so crazy that we can't trick ourselves into still rolling
with it, but things really start to stretch out our already
frayed cord of believability when everything involved in why
certain people are on this plane begins to unravel. Now
it was actually pretty entertaining watching these completely
insane and somewhat illogical plot points develop, it's just
that the believability factor, and the movie did have a fairly
heavy dose of believability anchoring it down when the movie
first began, just kind of got a little ridiculous. And
the ending is somewhat open ended. Probably not really,
if you think about, but maybe a little.
But still, with fine performances all around, led by Anthony
Montgomery who always seems to give solid performances in the
films I've seen him in, mostly small movies like this one,
'Chariot' was a surprisingly effective thriller that held on
just enough to its slipping grip on reality to still deliver
some solid entertainment.
