Flight Of The Phoenix is the remake of the 1965 original in which the survivors of a desert plane crash tries to build a new makeshift aircraft from the wreckage of the old one. The movie is predictable to the core and just doesn't seem to have anything that we haven't seen before.  

Captain Frank Towns ( Dennis Quaid) goes to Mongolia to close down an oil rig in the Gobi desert and to fly the crew back home. He is accompanied by his co- pilot A.J (Tyrese Gibson), the oil rigs female foremen (Miranda Otto), company man (Hugh Laurie), the rig workers and a hitchhiker (Giovanni Ribisi) who used to design airplanes. On their way they encounter a sand storm. The captain makes a disastrous decision- instead of turning back or delaying the flight, the captain decides to fly over the sandstorm. They are forced to crash-land in the desert, 200 mile off- course. When they realise that they are stranded and there is no hope for escape, they turn to the Hitchhiker for help. Using the parts and equipments of the crashed machine wreckage, they try to build a new one to escape....  

With director John Moore's staccato narrative not really getting anywhere beyond the sand dunes, the narrative seems to stretch out with as much undulating endlessness as the deserts.  The problem is not so much with the ambitious plot, which tries to be a titanic in mid-air, but with the characters who seem to be clumped together in mounds of absurd interaction and action.  They sneer, pray, fight and rebuild their flight back into civilisation - but without getting us involved in their awful predicament beyond the cursory glance of a spectator who sees a car crash on the highway and then drives away.

In spite of a drama-driven plot, the film lacks dramatic tension. Most of the time the characters seem to be following the rules laid own by the disaster genre rather than people caught in a bona fide crisis. But the picturisation of the plane crash is impressive as also the shots of the Gobi Desert which are beautiful..

In spite of a drama-driven plot, the film lacks dramatic tension. Most of the time the characters seem to be following the rules laid own by the disaster genre rather than people caught in a bona fide crisis. But the picturisation of the plane crash is impressive as also the shots of the Gobi Desert which are beautiful..

The actors - all survivors of a crash that goes way beyond the immediate - try to look parched and anxious...try being the key word!  Dennis Quade is a good actor but not comparable to Jimmy Stewart in the original. The others are okay.

John Moore's direction is strangely sterile. There are no interludes of any notable high drama in the narrative. Even the most powerful episode is treated with disdainful vapidity...as though the director had decided he'd tell a crooked tale as straight as possible. In doing so, he seems to have lost the plot. 

Strange, coming from a director who made the pungent and raw war film "Behind Enemy Lines". Maybe John Moore wanted to have a good time telling a messy story.