Hisssss.

Okay, time for a teeny-tiny review of Snakes on a Plane for you people. With the amount of hype it received, it could have gotten away with being horrible. I mean really, totally, Fear.com-level terrible. No one would have been shocked, it would still make money... lots of money. Really, there was no need to make a good movie.

... and yet...

... and yet, they DID make a good movie. Oh, not the best movie in the world. Not close to the best movie in the world. But something I'm not ashamed to spend money on. Something that people would be willing to see even if it weren't the darling of the Internet.

You see, they knew what they were doing. The temptation to admit how ludicrous the premise was must have been great; to smile, wink, have Sam Jackson say "motherfucker" every other line... in short, to make this an embarrassment of fan-service. I don't know that I could have resisted the temptation, were I Mr. Jackson, to mug for the camera, to spast out, to basically say "look at me, I'm in a movie about snakes that are on a plane! How wacky!"

But no! Everyone stuck to the golden rule of the theatre: the audience won't care if the characters don't. What makes good B-movies (and this, friends, is no more than an A-list B-movie) so great is that we, the audience, know that the situation is ludicrous, and they, the filmmakers, know that the situation is ludicrous, but dammit, for them, the characters, there are SNAKES on that PLANE and they are probably going to DIE.

HORRIBLY.

So yeah. It turned out to be good, against all odds and logic. Call it a seven out of ten, plus two 'cultural phenomenon' points. Go on... see it.