Jim Abrahams and the Brothers Zucker dared to parody one of the most successful Hollywood series in 1980 and managed to kill the series in its tracks. Their film, Airplane, sent-up the string of Airport films that had been churned out at Universal Studios since 1970, and it was a devastating blow.

All the trappings and gimmicks of the Airport franchise were brilliantly pilloried, from the central crisis ("There's no one left to fly the plane!" in the immortal words of Karen Black in Airport 1975) to treacly dialogue (though how could you ever best the bilge gushed by John Davidson in Airport 1979?). There's even a galaxy of has-beens filling Airplane's rows — perhaps not of the caliber of Charo, Brenda Vaccaro and Olivia de Havilland (courtesy of Madame Tussaud's), but who could top Barbara Billingsly speaking jive? Needless to say, no new Airport film has been released since Airplane.

Jodie Foster's latest vehicle, however, might just resurrect the genre. Flightplan strives to be a more serious in-flight saga than, say, Airport 1977, where a jumbo jet crashes into the sea and lands on the sea floor. But Flightplan's script is still about as hard to swallow. Even though the writers have taken the liberty of lifting large chunks from Alfred Hitchcock's delightful The Lady Vanishes, there are so many lost plot points and overwrought exchanges between characters that one halfway expects a special guest appearance by George Kennedy as TWA mechanic Joe Patroni.

Foster plays Kyle Pratt, a recent widow, who is leaving her life in Berlin to take her husband's body back to the States for burial. She and her young daughter, Julia, are, as luck would have it, taking the inaugural trip on a new jumbo jet that Kyle just happened to help design. After falling asleep once the plane becomes airborne, Kyle awakes to find Julia missing. Finishing a frantic search of the plane, where no one from passengers to crew have any recollection of ever seeing Julia, Kyle begins to demand that the captain (Sean Bean) take drastic action.

The mystery of Julia's disappearance deepens when the captain receives information suggesting that Julia, like Kyle's husband, died in Berlin. Has Kyle simply imagined she brought Julia with her (much as Margaret Lockwood's character is accused of fantasizing about the missing Miss Froy in The Lady Vanishes) or is there someone on board holding Julia hostage? And are the four Arab passengers (in a gratuitous nod to 9/11 paranoia) "evildoers"?

These questions and others are posed and sloppily answered. But the whats and whys in Flightplan's planning were no doubt deemed unimportant, as long as director Robert Schwentke, through tight editing, managed to create enough suspense to inspire popcorn sales.

Yet spare a thought for Jodie Foster, a good actress whose career seems to be mired in third-rate thrillers. 2002's Panic Room, with another plodding mother-and-daughter plot, seems, at times, to be Flightplan's lost twin, to the extent that someone dozing could be forgiven for momentarily forgetting which film they were watching. Foster's panicked blue eyes, steel-locked jaw and anxious, rhythmic breathing defines most of her performance in both. She is also afforded an opportunity to display the fruits of her weight training, a rather sorry descent for someone of her talent.

The rest of the cast is given even more cardboard to don. Bean, as the practical, level-headed Captain Rich would have made a fine co-pilot for Dean Martin in the original Airport. Peter Sarsgaard ends his run in interesting indy movies to play the plane's sky marshal, the man in charge of trying to reign in the desperate Kyle. Greta Scacchi pops up briefly, assuming the role of the psychiatrist on the train in The Lady Vanishes, to talk Kyle through her grief over the loss of her daughter.