‘Black Box’ Review: Geeky French Thriller Sifts Through the Pieces of a Suspicious Plane Crash
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film CriticBuckle up. “Black Box” is the kind of smart, taut conspiracy thriller Hollywood used to consistently make, only this one hails from France, which has been beating the American studios at their own game lately in the good-movies-for-grown-ups department. (Heck, most countries now do a better job than the U.S.
at respecting the audience’s intelligence.) Centered on the eponymous device, recovered from a freak airplane accident, this engaging if slightly overlong film stars Pierre Niney as an obsessive forensic analyst who hears the words “Allahu Akbar!” on a recovered cockpit voice recorder and can’t quite believe his ears.If the setup sounds a bit like Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out,” that’s hardly a bad thing, except “Black Box” centers on high-altitude hijinks, rather than a Chappaquiddick-like car crash.
Opening the movie in mid-air, director Yann Gozlan leaves the crisis mostly up to the imagination, firing our neurons rather than our adrenaline receptors as he dollies backward from the cockpit, through the cabin, all the way to the tail of the plane, where the black box is stored.
Fun fact: These devices are now bright orange, not black, but were so called back in the day, when the flight recorders used photosensitive material.
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