The glory of "Snakes on a Plane"

I’LL BE THE first to admit that when I first heard the mock fan trailers for “Snakes on a Plane,” complete with Samuel motherf*@#$ing (motherfreaking?) Jackson, my little heart giddily skipped a little.

There are snakes. On a plane. That’s the movie. I admire the barest simplicity.

The tagline is even more cheesy. “Sit back. Enjoy the fright.”

No self-respecting movie uses stupid puns like that in a marketing campaign even if said campaign, let’s face it, was unnecessary by the time the internet hype got involved.

After all, by all accounts, you really can’t call “Snakes on a Plane” a good movie. It may be shameless, unpretentious, mindless and still enjoyable, but it is nothing if not a stupid movie.

The whole draw comes from that it doesn’t try to convey any message about the ramifications of flying in a post-9/11 world, especially when there are snakes on planes.

Everyone I’ve asked about this movie has either squealed with glee that Samuel motherf*@#$ing (motherfreaking?) Jackson would soon blast away some CGI serpents or groaned with despair over the demise of American culture. I agree with both of them.

Even my friends that have seen and loved the movie append their praises with little disclaimers.

“That movie was so awesome, man. It had that part with that snake that was… I don’t want to spoil it for you, you just gotta see it. It’s the dumbest movie, but it’s so good.”

My mind boggles every time I hear something like that. Are people using some archaic definition of good that I don’t know about? Aren’t dumb and good generally mutually exclusive?

Movies that are good among the good are often the greatest of the great movies. Naturally, I can’t think of a truly great movie -— except comedies, of course, as comedies are by their very nature essentially stupid — that is still essentially dumb. Brain candy and any sort of vapid entertainment don’t go down in the annals of history as the entertainment that changed the world.

Rob Schnieder will never receive a lifetime achievement award from the Academy. “Snakes on a Plane,” as it is worthy to receive a high-budget Mystery Science Theatre 3000 treatment, is by the same treatment a genuinely bad movie.

“That’s sorta harsh,” you might say. “It may not win any awards, but it’s still a fun movie.”

Maybe the issue is really, then, that there are two sorts of good that people get confused. There are great movies, typically dramas or movies with “Blazing Saddles” or “Fifth Element” in the title, and then there’s “Snakes on a Plane.”

Entertainment Weekly called “Snakes on a Plane” a “cornball exploitation disaster” in their review, and I haven’t seen anyone in a position to disagree. But it still opened number one in the box office and any number of message boards.

It’s the one movie I know of that achieved cult status before the release and kept it only because people liked it before they saw it, but there may be some good.

If there’s a good thing about “Snakes on a Plane,” it’s that our B-movies have stopped taking themselves seriously, or that the studios do what the usually online fanbase tells them. That sort of fan involvement won’t do much for artistic integrity, but somehow I don’t think that artistic integrity was ever part of this picture.

I still haven’t seen it, but I most definitely will someday. There’s just no way that I would have used my hard-earned American dollars to pay to see this in the theater.
I’ll wait until my friends buy it.

Comment on this story in the Opinion forum >>