No redemptive stone is left unturned in “On a Wing and a Prayer,” Sean McNamara’s formulaic dramatization of the true events surrounding civilian Doug White’s 2009 emergency landing of a King Air 200 plane carrying his wife and children. Dennis Quaid leads a cast that includes Heather Graham, Jesse Metcalfe, Brett Rice and Rocky Myers through a “story of faith and survival” far less extraordinary than the filmmakers would have you believe, at least when working from a script by Brian Egeston that feels as mechanical as an aircraft instruction manual. Meanwhile, McNamara, best known for directing 2011 faith-based sleeper hit “Soul Surfer,” leans so heavily on the virtue of starting from the truth that he fails to recognize the abundance of elements that make his movie ring false.
Quaid personifies flop sweat as White, a Louisiana pharmacist who brings his brother Jeff (Rice) along on his pilot lesson — to heckle him, apparently — before the two of them, aided by his wife Terri’s (Graham) sauce, take first prize in a barbecue cook-off. Jeff dies days later, and the Whites travel to Florida for the funeral, where Doug experiences such a crisis of faith from the loss that he can’t even speak publicly about his brother. But only minutes into the flight back to Louisiana after the service, the pilot of their private plane succumbs to a fatal heart attack.
With nominal experience behind the yoke, Doug promptly panics, and air traffic control prepares for the worst; the likeliest outcome is a crashed plane and multiple lives lost, especially without any experienced pilots available to coach him. But in a last-ditch effort to find a solution, aspiring controller Dan Favio (Myers) makes a cellular call from inside the center — a federal offense — to connect with Kari (Metcalfe), an experienced pilot living in Connecticut who also knows the plane that Doug is flying, but is also carrying the weight of another plane crash in his past.
After Kari agrees to help by passing information through Dan to the flight official in touch with Doug, both the Whites and flight officials begin to breathe a sigh of relief. But when a storm rolls directly into the path of the flight, killing communication with air traffic control, Kari realizes that other contact must be made, direct with Doug, or else the pharmacist and his family will not survive the flight.
A cursory Google search didn’t produce a detailed enough account to determine how faithful this film is to the event that inspired it, but even taking its depiction at face value, what’s remarkable about “On a Wing and a Prayer” is how lazily it reduces some profound personal, professional and spiritual epiphanies to bullet points in a checklist of “uplifting” clichés and dramatic pivots. The Doug White on screen isn’t just inexperienced as a pilot, he’s absolutely terrified of the prospect — despite taking lessons; he reasonably asks what kind of God would take the life of his brother (and his father, long before the start of the movie), yet his faith is fully restored after his Lord and savior sends him up in an airplane whose pilot promptly dies, threatening not just his life but his entire family’s.
One of his daughter’s sins is excessive pride in the family’s achievements, and the other’s is in not suitably honoring her father and mother. Dan Favio hopes to become an air traffic controller, but he’s a combative alcoholic who breaks the rules and does his job with a hangover. Haunted by a plane crash that he couldn’t prevent, Kari Sorensen bottles up his feelings and alienates his girlfriend Ashley (Anna Enger Ritch) until she announces plans to leave him. Then there’s Donna (Raina Grey), a neglected preteen who dreams of flying herself and provides a layman’s play-by-play as the rest of the adult characters trade piloting lingo. Only Doug’s saintly, devout wife Terri doesn’t face a pivotal personal crisis, a blessing that elevates Graham’s steady-handed performance above those of her co-stars.
Regardless of how ham-fisted those other turns are, McNamara simply handles the material all wrongly, from the way he navigates the cramped space of the airplane to his treatment of an emotional arc that telegraphs its genuflection to God’s grace before the story takes off. Even being kind to a production that was obviously limited in its resources, he bafflingly swoops over, around and outside the plane instead of putting us in the co-pilot’s seat alongside Doug and Terri, yet re-creates piloting methodologies and language so exactingly that the experience becomes impossible to penetrate, perhaps except as a training video for future air traffic controllers to learn from.
Though it unfolds on a much bigger scale, something like “Apollo 13” seems the obvious (and much better) template for a film like this — the scrappy banding together of people to help save lives. Unfortunately, McNamara’s fealty to perfunctory, paper-thin absolution makes the film feel like he strapped this compelling story to a rocket and failed to give it the right fuel. Like “Soul Surfer” before it, “On a Wing and a Prayer” clearly aims to appeal to audiences seeking faith-based entertainment; but just because its story is based on events that are technically true, that doesn’t mean that ticket buyers should be subjected to a version of them that’s executed too predictably to believe.
“On a Wing and a Prayer” begins streaming April 7 on Prime Video.
