Robert Zemeckis, the Oscar-winning director of Forrest Gump and Back To The Future, returns to live action for the first time in more than a decade, directing his first R rated film since the early 1980s. And boy, does he earn that rating here. Flight is the story of a drug and alcohol-addicted airline pilot, who pulls off an audacious emergency landing that saves almost everybody on board, only to have criminal charges filed against him for failing a toxicology test. The film opens with Captain Whip Whitaker (an Oscar-nominated Denzel Washington) waking in a hotel room after an all-night bender. The room is littered with empty bottles and the side table is dusted with cocaine. A beautiful woman, one of his flight attendants, slides out of bed and proceeds to parade around the room naked. Zemeckis’ unflinching camera refuses to look away, lingering on her nakedness almost long enough to distract us from Washington as he sips from a warm beer and does another line of coke. He’s in a hurry. They have a plane to catch.

The flight of the title is the film’s centerpiece, a thrilling 30-minute sequence of mounting tension, as we see Whitaker mask his condition from his colleagues and passengers, continue drinking even while in control of the aircraft, and finally pull off and impossible feat of flying, in order to save all but six of those on board. It is easily the best segment of the film, and after such a thrilling opening act, Zemeckis has nowhere to go but down. The plot sees Whitaker reluctant, yet ultimately forced into recognizing and addressing his addiction, losing many friends and hurting many others along the way, including himself on multiple occasions. At times the film flirts with being a legal dissection of culpability, as the airline, pilots union and the National Transport Safety Board all jostle to apportion blame somewhere. Bruce Greenwood, Don Cheadle and Melissa Leo represent the various voices of reason and authority, but Zemeckis and screenwriter John Gatins are always more interested in Whitaker’s inner battle with himself and his demons.

Kelly Reilly, an up-and-coming British actress who scores a massive career boost landing this role, plays Nicole, a recovering heroin addict who befriends Whitaker in the hospital. The womanizing pilot quickly latches on to her, less as an emotional crutch than just good company, but Nicole is already on the road to sobriety, which causes much friction between the two characters. In fact the only person still on Whitaker’s team is his dealer, Harling (John Goodman), always primed and ready to deliver whatever exotic cocktail of substances Whitaker needs to get him through the day. Here again, Zemeckis embraces his R rating and seems to revel in a number of sequences of drug use that cross the line from merely authentic into instructional. There is clearly something in Zemeckis’ staging of these sequences that seems to lament the end of the “good old days”, aided in large part by classic rock and soul tunes blaring on the soundtrack whenever Whitaker falls off the wagon. What is most worrying is that these are far and away the strongest moments of the movie.

Denzel Washington is the core of the film, delivering an excellent performance of a tortured, devious man, living in denial and harbouring numerous addictions, who also happens to be a damn good pilot. He is as good as we have ever seen him, it is just a shame that Gatins’ script doesn’t take off into any interesting new territory and seems content to be just another morality tale about facing your addictions. Zemeckis gives the film plenty of style, whether it is always appropriate to the scene or not, but in the end you can’t help but wish this was more a film about the horrors of air travel, and less about the battle with the bottle.