Wonderfully tense and fun throughout, Non-Stop is everything you want in an action flick. It rarely gets bogged down in cliches, more or less just swims along with them. There are plenty of requisite "Hey bud, I'm not the bad guy, so I'm going to act like an asshole the way you think a bad guy will but everyone in the audience knows is not how the bad guy would act!" moments, as well as some neat twists and turns (I liked the subtle inclusion of text messaging on screen, less an "OH MY GOD, IT'S TECHNOLOGY!!" moment and more a shrug of the shoulders at how far we've come with it). And of course, there's a background storyline involving Liam's deceased daughter and of course there happens to be a young girl on the plane.

But this is a movie that knows its audience, knows what the audience wants and delivers on it. Unfortunately, as expected, the ending is fairly shoddy. After so many moments of "Is it him? Maybe it's her!", the resolution was bound to disappoint. Thankfully it's so swift you don't have time to process it, although that "We're the heroes by killing all of you!" scene was crap of the highest order.

One can't ignore the actors chosen for the movie. Solid action performances from Neeson, Michelle Dockery, Julianne Moore and a few others.

***

The supposed mystery of "whodunit" wears thin by the time the second act of the film gets going and it becomes a drag to the conclusion. Once the bomber is revealed, the intensity there works but everything before then doesn't, or is too generic to ignore. Neeson and Moore's chemistry was solid though.