Guess who's got the biggest snake?
  A really poorly scripted and executed motion picture deserves the same from its reviewers. That's my disclaimer: right up front.
 When a carpetbagger rolls into town selling snake oil, any folks dumb enough to purchase his offerings fully deserve them. As far as this flick is concerned it’s right there on the bottle, Snakes on a Plane — and you get what you pay for.
    Personally the whole concept struck me as being somewhat passé. My great friend Reuben is a helicopter pilot for China’s answer to Donald Trump — his boss has plenty of cash and big hair. Reuben used to be a real ladies man and they all used to say he had one of the biggest snakes they’d ever seen. Edmund was his name and Edmund was a three and a half meter long python.
    One day Reuben and I hatched an ingenious plan to take Edmund on a joy flight in a Bell Jet Ranger. There he sat, motionless on the back seat for the best part of an hour (the snake not Reuben). If the snake did anything out of the ordinary I swore I’d write a script and FedEx it off to my agent in Hollywood. No such luck.
    Edmund sat there the whole flight because (unlike Mormons and divorce attorneys) if you ignore snakes they just leave you alone and eventually go away.
     What’s more, like a ridiculously high proportion of the serpents that made cameos in Snakes on a Plane, Edmund was a python and pythons are not venomous. Yet every computer generated snake in this film – regardless of its species – viciously and indiscriminately attacked passengers.
     So why were they on the plane in the first place? Obviously someone put them there. Quite possibly the same casting agent also put Samuel L Jackson on the flight. He plays a tough ‘I don’t take shit from anybody’ black guy — a role that no doubt stretched the big guy. Sam’s escorting the key witness in a federal murder trial from Honolulu to Los Angeles. I have a problem with this.
    Why? Because the fictional murder suspect ‘Eddie Kim’ is a free man who is sitting at home in his LA mansion playing mah jong with his bodyguards. Sure Eddie murdered some guy – we saw it in the opening scene. However, even Hollywood has heard of due process. First you arrest the guy. Then you question him. Then you charge him. Then there’s a preliminary hearing, sometimes called a ‘mention’ (depending on the jurisdiction in which you’re being prosecuted). Then if you’re being represented by Johnnie Cochran, Alan Dershowitz and F. Lee Bailey you’ll get off on a technicality. If not, then there is a trial and then we call witnesses.
    Because Eddie is a free man he has time to hatch a cunning plot to kill the witness in a yet to be announced murder trial. That witness is played by Aussie actor Nathan Phillips. Nathan’s biggest credit to date was playing an annoying backpacker (as if there’s any other kind) in 2005’s slightly offbeat, but very funny, road trip film Wolf Creek. That particular role remains his best.
    And what’s Eddie Kim's plan? Air freight two pallets of live snakes on the flight. Unlike the cabin, cargo bays aren’t pressurized and at an altitude of 35,000 feet the temperature in the cargo bay drops well below zero. Snakes hate cold weather and their instinctive reaction is to hibernate in such conditions. But somehow they get out and invade the entire aircraft fatally biting more than fifty passengers.
     One such serpent, that I immediately recognized, was a green tree snake, arguably the most docile and least aggressive of all serpents. Poodles constitute a far greater danger to humans than this particular species of snake.
     So the snakes get out of the cargo hold – not the real snakes they’re all hibernating due to the extreme cold of the aircraft. The computer generated snakes invade the cabin and start attacking passengers – they begin in coach class and work their way through the aircraft. Amazingly, just like me, none of them are able to talk their way past the raving queen flight attendant who guards the curtain between coach and first class.
      That’s it. All the folks who are still alive move to the First Class deck and the snakes don’t get a look in. A couple of coral banded sea snakes make it into the cockpit and kill both the pilot and co-pilot, after spending the first half of the flight stowed away in a tall glass of Perrier water. The pilot and co-pilot are dead, there’s no flight engineer on this plane so Sam and some home-boy who’s a whiz at Sony Playstation2 land the plane. With a title like Snakes on a Plane, what did you expect?