Under different circumstances, something could have been made of this well-intentioned movie, a story of tragedy and obsession based on the 2002 Überlingen disaster, in which the collision of two jets in German airspace resulted in 71 deaths.
The action is transplanted to Columbus, Ohio, and Scoot McNairy does a decent job playing Jake, the air traffic controller involved. There is a very tense opening sequence in the control tower as disaster approaches. Arnold Schwarzenegger trudges through his role as Roman, a construction worker whose wife and pregnant daughter are killed in the crash, and who battles to find any official prepared to offer him a meaningful apology. His performance suggests a decent guy who has been badly let down by a heartless convocation of lawyers, but he fails to provide any plausible clue to the obsessive and retributive side to his character’s personality.
The screenwriter is Javier Gullón, who scripted Denis Villeneuve’s interesting doppelganger drama Enemy in 2013, and the film was co-produced by Schwarzenegger with Darren Aronofsky. I can imagine it coming to life in the hands of a director like Alejandro González Iñárritu or Jacques Audiard, but this is a two-dimensional piece of work.
