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One of the greatest moments in the history of Newsnight Review (or The Late Review, as it was then) was when Tom Paulin somehow managed to find deep meaning in Speed.

Somewhere around Sandra Bullock’s line about “what did we do to this guy – did we attack his country?”, Paulin convinced himself that it was actually an insightful look at individual alienation in a fracturing world, or something.

This would not have happened with Snakes On A Plane.

Snakes On A Plane tries to do nothing other than to mine every possible nugget of fun from that old, old story – what happens when a crime lord tries to kill a key witness by putting a load of (***SPOILER***) snakes on a plane. There is no social realism. There is no analysis of political agency or the innate prejudice that lurks beneath the facade of civilisation. The snakes are not symbols for anything, except for how awesome snakes are.

It is, thank fuck, not Crash.

It knows what it is. It is a snakes on a plane movie. The director knows what it is, the cast know what it is, and Samuel L Jackson (throwing himself into it, super serious, like there’s an Oscar for Best Reptile Antagonist) sure as hell knows what it is. The studio, of course, didn’t know what it was for quite a long time, but finally they just threw their hands up and went with the flow.

It has the best snake/toilet scene I have ever witnessed

Yeah, you can tell where the re-shoots happened – the tone jumps about like a rattler on Pro-Plus on a hotplate. But that means that you get the juicy stuff – the shots, the dialogue, the impalements (there are a surprising number of impalements, sadly none of them [**SPOILER**] on frozen, sharpened snakes) that are the whole darn point of any good snakes on a plane movie. The Internet really should be credited as a co-director.

It’s funny, really funny; sometimes with an overt, campy winkiness, other times just through sheer, joyful oversnaking. And it’s also a proper gory eat ‘em up, with several guaranteed frights and plenty of gruesome herpetological face-twatting.

It has the best snake/toilet scene I have ever witnessed, to the extent that well over an hour later, you walk out of the cinema shaking your head at the realisation that you just saw a film where a dying man screams (**SPOILER**) “somebody get this fucking snake off my dick”. And it feels good.

The non-Jackson cast are also enjoyable, manfully refusing to act like they’re in Airplane! when many of them really actually are playing characters from Airplane!. It has Julianna Margulies from ER. It has Nancy from Peep Show as a vacuous bimbette with a dog. It has Champ Kind from Ron Burgundy playing the co-pilot, and playing him as Champ Kind from Ron Burgundy. Whammy!

Criticisms? Sure. Duh. The tone flaps about a bit, as I said. They actually include for real that thing from the Orange adverts, where the guy ruins movie pitches by saying (**SPOILER**) “could they save the day through picture messaging?” (Seriously, they do). And the ending is more than a touch anti-climactic, going a bit too far down the comedy flightpath, and lacking the really big scene you wanted with Jackson going mano e snako with a seriously huge bastard snake.

But really, it hardly matters. It’s an unashamed and unafraid out-and-out creature-feature, a righteous chunk of OTT snakesploitation that puts the snakes right where you want them. On a motherfucking plane. It’s not quite at the level of a classic like Tremors - but with any luck, the sequel can improve on that. Snakes on a Plain: Snakes v Graboids. You know it would work.

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