Mike Colter and Gerard Butler to star in thriller that sounds like Con-Air meets Castaway

Gerard Butler is a hero pilot, Mike Colter is an accused killer, together they must save their crashed plane from pirates

By Sam Barsanti | August 4, 2021 | 2:36am

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Mike Colter and Gerard Butler to star in thriller that sounds like Con-Air meets Castaway

Gerard Butler (Amy Sussman/Getty Images), Mike Colter (Amy Sussman/Getty Images) Graphic: The A.V. Club

We’re a few decades out from the days when “Die Hard meets ____” was an action genre unto itself, but movie mash-ups like that are still a whole lot of fun. That’s part of why the pitch for director Jean-François Richet’s The Plane sounds surprisingly compelling. Based on this Hollywood Reporter story, the movie sounds kind of like it could be Con-Air meets Castaway meets Captain Phillips—or maybe replace Con-Air with an appropriately similar Tom Hanks movie. The Plane stars Gerard Butler as a guy named Brodie Torrance who is some kind of hero pilot who makes a successful emergency landing after his plane gets damaged (nope, no Tom Hanks movies that are like that), but the catch is that his plane lands “in hostile territory” on an island run by “militant pirates” who want to take the plane’s passengers as hostages.

Fun, right? Well, it gets better: Mike Colter from Evil and Luke Cage will also be there, playing a guy named Louis Gaspare who is described as a “cool-headed, ex-military man being extradited to Canada on charges of homicide when the plane crash lands on a dangerous remote island.” That’s also the point where things get confusing, since it’s not totally clear if Louis Gaspare was on Brodie Torrance’s plane when he was being extradited to Canada, or if this was a separate plane crash and these pirates are running an island that is just riddled with crashed planes, but Mike Colter will be there either way as some kind of heavy who may have killed somebody (which sounds potentially against type for him, which is fun).