THE KIDDIE VANISHES

REVIEWED - FLIGHTPLANSO JODIE Foster, an aeronautical engineer whose husband has just died mysteriously in Berlin, boards a trans-Atlantic flight with her daughter. After waking up from a doze, she finds the youngster missing. Her sharp features twisted into a tense fist, Jodie speeds up and down the aisle asking passengers and crew for assistance.

"Have you seen my daughter? She's six," she says about 80 times. Eventually the flight attendants elect to take Foster's pleadings seriously. But, after examining the manifest and talking to the other passengers, they decide the child was never on the plane at all.

Brilliant, isn't it? Yes, a similar plot has been worked through at least twice before: by Alfred Hitchcock in The Lady Vanishes and by Terence Fisher in So Long at the Fair. True, it seems utterly implausible that - presuming we are taking Jodie's story seriously - nobody would have seen the child. But it remains an intriguing set-up for a suspense story.

Sadly, it transpires the writers have no convincing solution to the conundrum they have set up. The last act of Flightplan, the details of which we will, of course, not go into, contains some of the most ludicrously perplexing narrative paroxysms ever committed to film: But if he did this then why did she do that? If that happened before the other thing, then why did they still do all those things? Who's he? What's that?

By the close of the film I and the other punters in my row had scrunched and hunched ourselves together into one great collective furrow of the brow. Homo sapiens did not spend the last few million years evolving mighty brains for this purpose.

Now, the director may very well point out that Hitchcock structured his thrillers round preposterously illogical plot turns. But Sir Alfred was so skilled at burying the Maguffins beneath layers of Freudian discomfort that one never really got the opportunity to properly check them for holes.

Robert Schwentke, the German director of the passable thriller Tattoo, does a decent line in flint-coloured suspense chic. Foster, though only allowed to sound one note throughout, manages the difficult task of appearing simultaneously fragile and purposeful. It will, however, take more than these humble diversions to distract viewers' attention from the accumulating absurdities on display.