So the plot is truly farfetched, the acting is less than great and the special effects a little on the dodgy side, but Snakes on a Plane has one thing going for it — the film has a great (but cheesy) premise, and one bad-ass performance from the king of all bad-asses, Samuel L Jackson. Snakes on a Plane is a bona-fide B-grade action movie, and it does not pretend to be anything else. If you are prepared to leave your brain at the door, this should be a fun movie to sit through.

The rather preposterous plot involves a mobster who thinks of the most indirect way of killing off a key witness of the prosecution — releasing a bunch of poisonous snakes on the flight the witness is on to ensure his demise (no, really). Unfortunately for the mobster, the man escorting the witness is Agent Neville Flynn (Samuel L Jackson), and he is one FBI agent that no one can mess around with, not even hundreds of poisonous snakes. As the passengers and crew are gradually offed one by one, the survivors band together to try to get off the plane alive — if that is even possible.

It is immediately apparent that one needs total suspension of disbelief to buy into the plot, but if you can look past the narrative flaws, there is a fair bit of enjoyable action that can be found in the film. Although there are more than a handful of supporting characters, none of them serve much purpose except to fulfill stereotypical roles or to die gratuitously.

Snakes on a Plane becomes dramatically inert once the snakes are released, and director David R Ellis seems to have run out of ideas by the middle of the movie, resulting segments of the movie repeating themselves over and over again, only with very slight variations. Of course, to nit-pick at this movie would be rather unfair — Snakes on a Plane is designed to be a disposable, inconsequential movie that will entertain throughout its running time, and in that aspect the film performs admirably well.