Please secure your tray tables and paranoid mothers: "Flightplan"

I used to travel a lot for business ... maybe 2-3 times a month, from coast to coast and even Alaska. I've been on a few planes, and my check-in routine is so polished that I can't remember the last time I set off a metal detector. ("But officer, it's only a small-caliber pistol ... ")

If there was a common denominator in all of these flights -- we're talking more than 100 round-trips over four years -- it was not having enough room. This is painfully obvious when you have the middle seat on an old America West jet on a redeye from Phoenix to the East Coast. (Tylenol PM washed down with a Jack and coke, anyone?) But even when you find the gold mine of seats -- the empty exit row -- you still only have that little bubble of space, and forget finding any elbow room outside of that. How smokers and people with back problems manage, I have no idea.

I share all of this because the key plot point of "Flightplan" -- a woman may or may not have lost her little girl on a plane -- requires a rather significant leap of faith. No matter how much stuff people cram in overhead bins and flight attendants cram in galleys, it's gotta be hard to hide a whole girl. Which, of course, is why the mom who claims she's missing must be crazy.

The trailers showed us all of this, which caused me to think "eh ... maybe" when "Flightplan" was in theaters. I can't recall the reviews being particularly good or bad, so no real regrets at missing it on the big screen. Instead, I called on Netflix, since I figured this would be a movie that The Woman Who Gives My Life All Meaning and I could watch together. (Someday she'll appreciate "Krull.")

Playing the panicked woman is Jodie Foster ("The Hotel New Hampshire"), which makes our second "Taxi Driver" connection in about a week. (And get this: Harvey Keitel was in "Reservoir Dogs," while Cybill Shepherd was in "The Last Picture Show," which I'm watching now. Weird.) Now in her 40s, Foster has settled into the icy, hard woman role. Not so much an butt-kicker, even with "Panic Room," as a cold person with cold blue eyes that get really big with something's amiss.

In this case, she and her 7-year-old daughter are flying from Germany to New York with Foster's dead husband in a casket in the cargo hold. Clearly these ladies are distraught, and they end up taking a little nap in empty rows across from each other. The only problem is that when Foster wakes up, the girl is gone. What follows is a search that goes from casual to intense, much like the scrutiny of Foster's sanity by such folks as the captain (Sean Bean) and an air marshal (Peter Sarrrrrrsgaaaaaaaaaard). Evidence mounts that the girl was never on the plane, and as you might expect, Foster doesn't take this claim very well.

None of this is a shock to anyone who saw the previews. What is surprising is the timetable, and without giving too much away, the above series of events -- and others -- didn't play out the way I expected. The final outcome may not have been all that great by itself -- raising more than a few questions -- but it was nice to see a movie stray from the standard route.

Put another way, I'm no Kreskin or Nostradamus, but I can spot lazy storytelling a mile away. (See "Hide and Seek" below.) That wasn't the case here, and even people who might suspect they know what's really going on probably won't guess the full story. It was enough to keep me watching, as least until "Krull" came on.