The movie opens in a hotel room, Whip Whitaker (Washington) and a woman (we find out she's a flight attendant on his plane) wake up from a bender, still messed up from the night before. He has a colorful telephone argument with his ex-wife about money before he takes a takes a nose full of cocaine. Then Whip leaves the hotel, dressed in a pilot's uniform.
The subplot is of an young woman named Nicole (Kelly Reilly). She is walking the razor's edge of addiction. She falls off hard when she scores some very strong drugs and chooses to shoot up rather than sniff it.
In the meantime, Whip reports for duty, completes all his pre-flight checks, and takes off through some incredibly bad weather. He manages to find the one sliver of calm in the clouds and though it's scary getting there, he is able to thread the needle and put the plane into smooth air. The 40 minute hop from Orlando to Atlanta is on its way, he slips from the cabin to grab a couple bottles of vodka while the plane is on auto pilot. He goes back to the cabin and falls asleep at the controls. Suddenly, everything goes south, literally, when the plane pitches into a dive. He is immediately awake, immediately in control, and immediately the consummate professional. He is calm in the face of the panic of everyone around him. I won't give the details away, but what he does with that plane is genius and heroic. He lands the plane with minimal loss of life and like the typical drunk driver, he is virtually unscathed.
When Whip wakes up in the hospital, he finds his old friend and union rep Charlie Anderson (Bruce Greenwood) waiting in his room. He knows that he landed the plane, but has no idea what happened to everyone on board. Protocol is the NTSB must be the first contact after the crash. At the news that members of his crew are amongst those who died, he is visibly shaken. It seems that he knows that his secret is about to catch up with him. He knows he needs to be clean. In fact when his friend (and dealer) Harling (John Goodman) shows up, he refuses the additional "help" he's brought.
It is in the hospital we understand the intersection of lives. Broken people manage to find other broken people. In the stairwell one night, Whip meets Nicole. She lived through the overdose and wants to be clean now. He is drawn to her. He leaves the hospital and goes to his family farm, away from the media circus waiting outside his condo. Once there, he dumps the considerable amount of alcohol and drugs he has stashed away. Determined to be clean, determined to tough it out. He finds Nicole and brings her to stay with him. Like I said, broken people manage to find other broken people.
But, every alcoholic is only one incident away from their next drink. Whip's comes in the form of a breakfast meeting with Charlie and a Hugh Lang, a lawyer (Don Cheadle). Whip asserts that the airline put him in a broken plane, and no one else could have landed it (which turns out to be true). He asserts that he is a hero. He is prepared to take any blood tests the NTSB may require. The tipping point comes when he finds that those blood tests were already done immediately after the crash. Those tests reveal what we (and he) already knew, he was drunk and high when he stepped on to that plane.
It is from here, the story goes from bad to worse. Whip falls deeper, and deeper into his own nose dive, but he doesn't see it. He continues to assert that the problem was it was a broken plane, why did they send him up in a broken plane? That is where the blame lies. For a brief second, we think that he is going to be okay, and then he crashes again.
I won't give away the ending, since well, what's the point in watching a movie, if you're not going to watch the ending. Let's just say that even though the plane crashes, there are survivors.
This is not an easy movie to watch. It is definitely not a movie where you are going to like very many of the characters and root them on. This movie does contain nudity, some very tough language, adult situations, and a very scary plane crash. Washington's performance is once again top notch. I vacillated from hating the man to feeling horrible for him and back again. It does, however, give an clear picture of the incredible damage that addiction does to lives. I love the incredible metaphor built by the filmmakers here. Whip's life in parallel with what happened in the plane crash. The wreckage all around him, and yet he continues to not see what really happened.
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