In 2006, a trailer was released for a crazy little movie that caused the entire internet to collectively shit its pants. That little movie was Snakes on a Plane. Yes, the title says it all. A herd of angry snakes was going to be attacking passengers mid-flight, with only Samuel L. Jackson to save them all from certain destruction and death. Naturally.
It was a movie the likes of which we had never seen on the big screen before. So blunt. So exciting. So ridiculous. Bring it on! The memes, the jokes, the mentions and the excitement were on full display awaiting the film’s August 2006 opening.
And then…nobody saw it.
What had started out as a wave of internet buzz died at the box office and the world moved on to something else. Which is stupid, because I’m here to tell you that Snakes on a Plane is a damn fun movie. And a lot of that comes from the fact that director David R. Ellis didn’t set out to make something revolutionary. Snakes is a silly B-movie and knows it’s a silly B-movie. It knows what the audience wants and what we’re there to see.
We get a basic set up – nothing too complicated or grandiose. We start in Hawaii, where surfer Sean (Nathan Phillips) finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and sees mega mobster Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson) murder the district attorney who has been building a case against his crime ring. Shawn is quickly intercepted by FBI agent Neville Flynn (Jackson), who convinces him to fly to Los Angeles to testify against Kim at his upcoming trial. Kim, the criminal mastermind that he is, puts a shit-ton of snakes in the cargo hold of the plane and rigs their boxes to open mid-flight. To make his plan even more dastardly, he also soaks a bunch of flowers with snake pheromones and sticks them in the cargo hold as well, making the snakes extra aggressive and super pissed off.
That’s it. We get the snakes on the plane, and then we try to survive the snake attacks until we can land the plane safely in L.A. Simple? Yes. Genius? Absolutely – in that balls-out, totally silly, William Castle-y kind of way.
Because we’re not here for mystery. We’re not here for a complex crime thriller. We’re here because we want to see a bunch of passengers attacked by snakes at thirty thousand feet.
And that is exactly what Ellis delivers. When the snakes are released, it’s practically like he yells “Game On!” from somewhere off-camera. We get snakes in vomit bags. In toilets. Falling out of the ventilation system. Crawling under the chairs. Popping out of the instrument panel and attacking our pilot. They bite every body part imaginable. Taylor Kitsch has an unfortunate experience when he tries to bang his girlfriend in the bathroom. One lady gets bitten in the eyeball. Some other dude gets bitten on the dick.
The list goes on, and because horror fans are a deliciously evil breed of audience, we cheer.
And that’s not even including what happens when the passengers begin to fight back. Snakes are tasered, smashed, burned and microwaved. Massive carnage ensues. Lin Shaye saves a baby. We continue cheering.
Along the way, the passengers are, of course, presented with an increasingly difficult series of challenges that must be overcome – leveling the plane when the co-pilot becomes incapacitated, getting the ventilation system reset, sucking the poison out of small child’s snake bite and relying on a gamer played by Kenan Thompson to land the plane when nobody else can.
Snakes on a Plane works because it is a gleeful film that is more than happy to deliver the goods. It embraces its silly premise and leans in hard. There’s something magic about that. It’s a film that begs for popcorn and beer and lots of laughs and cheering. It’s a film that was made to be fun. Full stop.
And it all ends with a bitchin’ video from Cobra Starship. What else do you want?
So yes, Snakes on a Plane was a box office failure, but really, that’s because the audience failed it. Now more than ever, we can really appreciate fun when it heads our way, and if you missed the opportunity to see this entertaining movie, maybe it’s time to remedy that and give it the love that it deserves. Because some things are more than just a ridiculous meme.
Snakes delivers tons of fun in exchange for a mere 90 minutes of your time. It’s a win-win.
