Jodie Foster's fiercely intelligent performance drives this disappointing thriller, whose taut, carefully constructed first half is sadly negated by its implausible and — worst of all — unengaging conclusion. Widowed American airplane-engineer Kyle Pratt (Foster) is returning to New York a week after her husband's death in a fall — or was it a suicide leap? — from the roof of their Berlin apartment building. She and her 6-year-old, Julia (Marlene Lawston), are booked on a double-decker deluxe jumbo jet, and if Kyle seems high-strung, well, she has a dead husband in the hold and a grief-rattled little girl in her arms. Exhausted, Kyle surrenders to an exhausted nap after take off; when she awakes, Julia is gone. Kyle tries to be reasonable: She knows no one can get off a plane in midair. But as the minutes tick by and Julia remains missing, Kyle begins to feel the cold hand of panic tighten around her heart. The flight crew — from the coolly authoritative captain (Sean Bean) and sympathetic young stewardess (Erika Christensen) to the professionally dispassionate air marshal (Peter Sarsgaard) — are initially willing to give Kyle the benefit of the doubt, but grow increasingly impatient as inconsistencies in her story arise. Kyle can't produce Julia's boarding pass, the child isn't on the passenger manifest, her backpack is gone and no one remembers seeing Kyle with a child, not even the stewardess who did the pre-takeoff headcount. Has Kyle's razor-sharp mind, the one thing on which she could always rely, betrayed her, or is she entangled in some conspiracy she can't begin to fathom? This is good stuff, just plausible enough to make your throat tighten a little: Kyle's increasing desperation makes her look crazy, and early scenes involving Julia are cleverly staged — in retrospect they can be read two entirely different ways. But once the ambiguity is resolved, the film degenerates into a formulaic action spectacle. Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray's "original" screenplay is a shameless amalgam of BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING (1965), in which a young mother searches for the small daughter no one remembers seeing, and Alfred Hitchcock's THE LADY VANISHES (1939), in which an elderly woman disappears from a moving train whose passengers swear she was never aboard; they even "borrow" a key clue directly from Hitchcock's witty, 65-year-old puzzler. German filmmaker Robert Schwentke, whose gloomily virtuoso TATTOO (2002) was a sit-up-and-take-notice variation on post-SE7EN (1995) serial-killer conventions, does sleekly utilitarian work here, with occasional gratuitous stylistic flourishes. --Maitland McDonagh
