There has been quite some hype about this movie: Having a title that is both straightforward and funny (because »snakes on a plane« seems to be some American proverb whose true meaning I haven’t found out yet), it gained very much popularity in the Internet. The huge fan response even made New Line Cinema re-shoot some scenes so that it got a R rating instead of a modest PG-13. There were even some dialogue lines written by the movie’s fans.
All in all, »SoaP« is said to be a B-Movie with an »A« budget. I expected exactly that when I entered the cinema, but the movie turned out to be completely different – in a positive sense.

First of all, there’s nothing in this movie that looks cheap. Some reviews said that the computer-generated snakes are sub-standard (on purpose). I totally disagree – in fact, the VFX quality is quite above average, considering the excruciatingly bad quality of the effects in today’s »serious« movies. Even the story and dialogue lives up to today’s standards. So either SoaP is particularly good, my expectations were lower than I admit, or the other movies I’ve seen lately (only »A« titles!) were so bad that even this B-Movie flick compares favourably to them.

So, all in all I’m pretty happy with this movie. The story is OK (not really bright, but not too bad either), there is just the right amount of jokes in it (my favourite one: »all praises to the PlayStation!«), the visual quality is good and the soundtrack rocks. However, it’s funny to note that the best-known line from the movie – Samuel L. Jackson’s »I’ve had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfuckin’ plane» – seems completely misplaced due to the fact that this is one of the fan-written and re-shot scenes. (Also, the German translation of the line isn’t half as good as the original :)