Is “Snakes on a Plane” as cheesy as it sounds?

Of course it is. It is also great fun and is absolutely one of my favorite films of the summer.

“Snakes on a Plane” is like walking through one of those haunted houses they put up every fall. Things jump out at you and you scream and start laughing as you try to get away. Instead of teenagers dressed up as ghouls and killer clowns though, this “haunted house” has the largest collection of venomous snakes known to man.

If you don’t already know the plot, you’ve obviously been living in a cave since this movie has been hyped to the nth degree for months. It’s pretty straight-forward. A young man witnesses a mob kingpin murder the attorney prosecuting him. The young man gets away, but now the mob is out to eliminate him before he can testify against the boss. The FBI finds the twenty-something extreme athlete first and gets him on a plane from Hawaii to Los Angeles but the mob boss, who has corrupt people everywhere, finds the plane before it takes off and loads it up with venomous snakes. As an added bonus, the bad guys spray all of the leis that the passengers receive with a pheromone, one guy later calls it “snake crack,” that makes the snakes super aggressive.

Then the games begin.

What follows once the snakes are released from their time locked crates is 10-20 minutes of perfect mayhem. I hate snakes and while there were times I didn’t want to look because I knew what was coming, I couldn’t look away. There were cobras and rattlesnakes and snakes of so many colors and types I couldn’t even identify them all. Eventually, things slow down and the surviving passengers band together to try to keep the snakes contained so that they can survive this deadly flight.

The key to the film is Samuel L. Jackson as Agent Flynn. He is cool, he is calm and he is collected as he protects the passengers and guides the audience through the world’s most dangerous flight. The only other standout in the cast is Julianna Marguiles as a flight attendant on her last flight before retiring to go to law school. She is Flynn’s right hand woman for much of the flight and goes all out to save as many people as she can. The rest of the cast reminded me of the passengers on the bus in “Speed,” a group that represents practically every group in America; rich, poor, black, white, young and old. The movie seems to say, “See America, people of all races and creeds can come together and work towards defeating a common goal, like terrorists or, in this case, snakes.”

While the beginning and very end of the movie felt a bit rushed and both over and under-acted, the entire flight portion of the film is actually a fairly deft bit of filmmaking. There is plenty of tension built into the story and the director basically turns the camera on and follows the action. There are some nifty maneuvers too, such as the snake’s eye view, but for the most part the film just involves the passengers trying to keep themselves alive.

Is the movie a hit? Will it be a cult classic? Who cares? If you want to have a good time at the movies, go see “Snakes on a Plane.” You know what you’re getting and the makers of this film don’t disappoint. They give it to you in spades.

***1/2