Non-Stop

In addition to being a riveting thriller, Non-Stop has an interesting political agenda. It’s about and for paranoia. Its effectiveness as a thriller makes its political undertow all the more dangerous.

The opening shot establishes the film’s subject: a close-up of a troubled, grizzled, unkempt, shaking Bill Marks (Liam Neeson). As we know from the trailer — and as the film quickly confirms — the hero is a US air marshall, i.e., the personification of post-9/11 US Security.

But instead of being in steady control this federal Bill is all victim, all marks. The bad guys have framed him to appear to be the hijacker holding the plane and passengers for a $150 million ransom. As events play out, though, for all his apparent weakness and ostensible guilt he still proves the hero. That is to say, however suspect and incompetent Homeland Security may appear to be, we have to give it our abiding trust. If we want to survive the terrorist threat we have to accept our security system whatever weakness and corruption the Snowdens and cynics may expose in it.

Bill shows a lot of sins the film teaches us to forgive. He not only drinks on the way to work but he futilely tries to cover up his weakness. When he smokes in the plane’s john he’s a federal officer breaking a federal law. A relatively minor crime but still, we’re led to accept this criminal because he’s got a badge. In the good guy we’re supposed to excuse anything. And despite everything the other passengers see him do, all his violence, dictatorial commands, beating up and even killing the wrong guys, capped by his damning exposure on the TV news, they’re supposed to keep supporting him. The film calls for blind trust in one’s security force, regardless of all they do and all the bad things you hear about them. Indeed the villains’ intention is not to get the 150 Mill but to discredit the US security system. So if any of us feel disenchanted by anything negative we hear about our real life security system, why, then we’re just playing into these bad guys’ hands.

At least Bill’s a little better than the other marshall on the flight, Jack Hammond (Anson Mount), whom the bad guys have played like an organ by planting the bomb in his briefcase of smuggled cocaine. A bomb in coke is a lot of blow. Not to mention one high Jack. Indeed even Bill’s guilt is rooted in virtue. Because he was too dedicated to his cop duties he didn’t spend enough time at his dying little daughter’s bedside. He’s given another tyke to protect here, to win redemption.

To compound our paranoia the film plays against all our expectations, especially in our profiling of the suspects (the other passengers). The apparent thug is a NYC cop who first leads the mutiny against our suspicious saint but then converts. The turbaned Moslem (of course Terrorist Suspect #1) tuns out to be an urbane doctor, with a super-medical scientific speciality to boot. Why, our hero is Irish but not IRA! 

And the bad guys? The bespectacled high school teacher and the clean-cut black computer nerd. Now, when it’s our All-American schoolteachers and computer nerds who are turning terrorist our paranoia needs no limits. Nor, the film murmurs, should our faith in our security system, however weak, incompetent and even criminal it may be.