Last Flight to Abuja

Netflix has recently been airing interesting foreign films, but they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel with this one. The obviously low-rent execution of this film doesn't bother me very much, but the horrid script and wildly uneven acting does.

This film is ostensibly about an airplane crash, but aside from the first 5 minutes and the last 20, it's actually a badly scripted and unevenly acted chamber drama with serious pacing problems. The plot aimlessly meanders between the personal lives of various characters, most of which are so uninteresting that the film feels far longer than its brief 75 minutes (a problem compounded by too many pointless establishing shots of aircraft taxiing - we already know we're at an airport!). The main actors do a good job, but the script often has them prattling aimlessly; minor characters are mere sketches, and many of the performances are cringe-worthy. Speaking of cringing, the attempts at comic relief are so unfunny that I'm unsure whether to even describe them as such, and it's obvious that the filmmakers knew almost nothing about how airliners actually operate.

This film would have been much better had it focused on the crash and on the embezzlement subplot. Attention low-budget filmmakers: in most cases, it's best to choose one interesting idea and focus on that.