Movie Flight Recommendation: Queenpins

When I select an in-flight movie to watch, I have a few important criteria to consider:

• Low special effects: The movie can’t have a lot of cool effects that I’d rather watch in my home theater.
• Not great sounding: As with the special effects, I don’t want the movie to have an amazing soundtrack, amazing bass, or great 3D audio when I’m on an airplane
• Not deep: With all of the distractions on a plane, I want the story to be fairly straight forward so that it’s not too hard to follow

With this in mind, I usually try to focus on comedies and dramas as they generally are more about setting the stage with dialog than with amazing effects and sounds.

Today’s movie flight recommendation is Queenpins. On Delta airlines, the movie is 110 minutes and 37 seconds long, which includes 5:13 of ending credits and roughly two minutes of Delta advertising at the beginning, making the film around an hour and 40 minutes long. This is a good duration for flights that lasts a couple of hours.

The movie stars Kristen Bell and Kirby Howell-Baptiste as the two main protagonists (or antagonists, depending on your view), and their chemistry on-screen is amazing. It also stars Vince Vaughn and Paul Walter Hauser, the detectives who are trying to catch the stars.

The movie centers around Bell and Howell-Baptiste. The duo realizes that manufacturers will send coupons for free products if they complain, but they soon want more so they begin running a scheme to obtain fraudulent coupons to sell on the open market, raking in millions of dollars in the process. This gets the attention of a Loss Prevention Officer (Hauser) who partners with a Postal Inspector (Vaughn) to identify and shutdown the ring.

The movie isn’t very deep, making it a great flick to watch on a plane because it’s completely dialog driven, relatively light hearted, funny, and the two main leads have a great chemistry together. You won’t be annoyed at distractions from the flight crew because the plot is relatively straight forward, and you don’t miss anything by watching it on a tiny screen embedded into the seat in front of you. It’s also a fun movie to watch as a family, where you could use the plot as a discussion about morality.

Overall, this is a perfect movie to watch on a relatively short flight.

• Movie Score: 8/10
• Fezmid’s Flight Score: 10/10
• Duration: 110 minutes (excluding credits)
• Overall: Highly Recommended