Chabert Watch! Non-Stop (2013)

Watched:  04/03/2025

Format:  Amazon Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Richard Gabai

Is this movie an absurdist comedy?  Or a straight-up Lifetime thriller that had two drafts written and then they shot it?  I honestly, earnestly do not know.

Non-Stop (2013) is a 90 minute movie that starts getting to the action in minute 41 or so, dragging out a both boring and overly elaborate set-up that includes exposition dropped during the credits - because no one thought to include this information in the rest of the film.  This is Lacey Chabert doing her absolute best against a movie that makes no sense and every actor seems to think they're in a different movie.  Meanwhile, Chabert is trying to convey something that the writing doesn't help her with at all.

I am not averse to the locked-room-mystery-aboard-transportation.  Give me a murder on a boat, a lady vanishing from a train, snakes on a plane.  But this is not a murder mystery for Lacey to sleuth out.  This is a movie that doesn't understand how these movies work, provides far too few potential suspects and a single motivation, and muffs the ending.  It realizes it has plot holes at the 2/3rds point and goes back and tries to paper them over with gigantic neon signs along the way, so you know what's up every time a plot point is introduced and where we're headed.

Chabert plays the assistant to a researcher/ author of a book that is going to blow the lid off of a growing, right-wing fascist movement.  The reporting in this book will, apparently, make the movement dissolve like Dracula in sunlight.  Wishful thinking, but this is still 2013.

She was dumped by her fiancee for "working too hard" six months prior, and is still devastated.  

The problem with discussing this movie is that there's so many weird and bad choices by the writer, director, producer and editor - and it's so not worth discussing each one (okay: she just keeps taking pills to sleep and then drinks Scotch - this movie should have been 50 minutes of Chabert honk-shoo-ing).  What I can say is that the other characters are all so awful to Chabert across the board that I thought for a minute that there was going to be some twist that Chabert was crazy or something and misreading everyone.  Hilariously, one of these characters is Jim O'Heir from Parks and Rec (Jerry/Gerry) who has a hilarious, out-of-nowhere turn to the pervy.

Is it stupid?  

In so many ways.

The biggest problem with the movie is that all she really has to do is sit tight til the flight ends to resolve her mysteries, but instead she's up running around the plane hassling everyone, which would probably get you restrained til the end of a flight.  The movie also assumes (1) there are a limited number of copies of this book that exist entirely on the person of Lacey Chabert, and that no one else has a copy.  And (2) I believe we're at the book launch at the beginning of the film, so it feels like many horses have already left the barn.

But, yeah, the other characters are kind of just *mean* to Chabert, from wild-eyed strangers in the lounge to random passengers.  Especially one flight attendant for absolutely no reason, but she's so mean, it's funny.  Which made me wonder - was this supposed to be funny?  Because it's mostly not?  Except it feels so dumb, it is?  I need help.

This may be the first pairing of Will Kemp and Chabert, who have co-starred in a few movies over on Hallmark.  He's a random guy that she decides to mack down with in the back row, which had some familiar vibes.  But then, Will Kemp disappears, and we can all guess he's the baddie.

I will say - in this movie I learned that big transcontinental airplanes have secret rooms for flight attendants.  I had no idea.  It's kind of cool.  

Logistically, this movie seems like an okay idea.  If you had the airplane set, all you need is a handful of actors to populate the plane.  But everything else about the movie - including the twist reveal at the end, is so clunky, it's kind of oddly mesmerizing.  

The big twist is that Lacey is not the assistant, she's the actual author and they hired a guy to play....  never mind.  It's so weird and frankly unnecessary.  Chabert is not a bad actor, but when you're stuck with what's on the page, she's freaking Meryl Streep getting across that her character has an inner life and is having an experience beyond some major annoyances on a plane.

I guess the male hero is a former Disney kid who had a recording career around the release of this movie.  He is bad.

Who is good is the mean stewardess, played by Betsy Russell, who I guess somehow is in several Saw movies - which I find surprising based on what I thought was the premise of Saw.  

I could go on all night, but I won't.