Gerard Butler plays a commercial airline pilot who is forced to make an emergency landing in the southern Philippines, and then rescue his passengers from terrorists. It is a classic ‘you’ll either dig it or you won’t’ action movie premise, with no aspirations to originality or insinuations of greatness. Even the title is fundamentally generic and to the point: Plane. Despite a US theatrical release, this by-the-numbers slice of Die Hard-esque mayhem skipped Australian cinemas entirely. Without even a DVD for the physical media crowd, it is now streaming locally via Amazon Prime.

One has to hand it to Butler. He is a properly talented actor who has found a comfortable niche headlining second-string action vehicles. 30 years ago they would have premiered on VHS in Blockbuster and Video Ezy stores. Now they tend to bounce off short theatrical runs or simply premiering on the highest-bidding streaming service. The films themselves are very hit and miss, but Butler is unfailingly one of the best elements in them. Plane is predictable, and its production values are serviceable, but Gerard Butler is comfortably entertaining from beginning to end.

Butler is Scottish pilot Brodie Torrance, flying from Singapore to Honolulu via Tokyo. Against his better judgement, Torrance agrees to fly the plane through a violent storm – at which point a lightning strike kills the plane’s electronics and forces him to crash-land on the lawless Jojo Island. When he leaves the passengers to search for help, he finds the island is ruled by dangerous terrorists who plan to hold the passengers for ransom. Teaming up with an escaped murder suspect (Mike Colter), Torrance – who is ex-RAF – sets out to rescue them.

There is an element of truth behind Plane‘s Filipino setting. The southern Philippines really is home to multiple Islamist factions and anti-government militias, however they are used here simply as stereotypical token villains to be easily shot, stabbed, and in a few cases bludgeoned to death with sledgehammers. To a large extent that is par for the course for this sort of action film, but it is also apparent that among the passengers of Torrance’s aircraft the majority of casualties are Asian as well. It is almost certainly not intentional, but even through simple inattention it is not the best look.

Mike Colter is a rock-solid secondary lead as the mysterious Louis Gaspare, and there are reasonable performance across the supporting cast including Tony Goldwyn, Daniella Pineda, and Yoson An. They make decent characters out of extremely sparse material: viewers have all seen this sort of film before, and it has been done better many, many times. Jean-François Richet deserves better assignments, and has directed much better films (his two-part thriller Mesrine earned him a 2009 César award for directing). It seems his heart really was not in this one: it is watchable, and even broadly enjoyable, but it is Butler and his co-stars that are doing the heavy lifting.