not great
“The Last Flight of Noah’s Ark” is a fairly harmless Disney film, unless you think children watching a film about cardboard characters doing idiotic things is contagious. The film plays like “Swiss Family Robinson” meets a Sunday church picnic but, still, it’s hard to presume just who this movie is aimed at and at the same time, even harder to find much entertainment value in it.
It stars Elliot Gould as pilot Noah Dugan. Dugan owes money and is desperate for a job and so he winds up getting hired by a missionary (Genevieve Bujold) to fly her and a plethora of animals to an island where she can start a missionary colony. Along for the ride are two orphans (Ricky Schroder, Tammy Lauren) who don’t like Dugan’s surliness around the animals and so they stow away on board to protect them.
Complications ensue when the old, decrepit plane they’re using winds up going off course and crash landing on an island in the South Pacific, though crash landing is a bit of an overstatement here. The film is so abysmally shot and edited in this sequence that the plane doesn’t seem to so much crash but bump into the island and come to a complete stop.
Anyway the four wind up on the island where two Japanese soldiers still believe World War 2 is being fought. They open fire on the Americans and the missionary believes stepping into the line of the fire of the bullets is a path to friendship. Dugan of course is more pessimistic about that plan. Being that this is a Disney film also trying to be a religious one, you guess who winds up being right.
The film has been made pleasant to a fault. The Japanese soldiers are less scary and more like two bickering, cartoonish uncles, the animals are barely seen (all I saw was one bull and one duck) and when they are they’re about as docile, undemanding, and negligible to the whole plot as can be. And the kids are there to be cute and cry over the animals when need be and the fact they’re also orphans probably made the manipulative screenwriter go “ka-ching”.
Gould and Bujold try to carry this whole thing but no one and nothing ever comes off the least bit identifiable here- its preaching about friendship and non-violence is thin moralizing, the romance that springs up between the two has all the enthusiasm and charm of doing taxes, and all the “Swiss Family Robinson” stuff is workman-like and dull when it should be fantastical and have a good sense of humor.
It all gets worse. He’s a dunderhead who doesn’t believe in anything while she takes faith to levels almost as bad. The worst is once they discover they need to turn the plane into a raft. They coast along the water, eventually being attacked by a shark. It knocks both Gould and Schroder into the water and rather than help, she decides to pray. The woman walks into bullets and into enemy huts within the forest. She can’t help?
Everything about “Noah’s Ark” comes off terribly dispassionate- including Maurice Jarre’s flavorless, mind-numbing attempt at church music in the song “Half of Me”- that we wonder what kids will even take away from it. Will they care about all the preaching? There isn’t much with the animals or the humans to really identify with? In the end, I feel like they most fun they’ll have with this is the shark.