Silly me, I thought it was called "Snacks on a Plane." It was going to be a documentary about those delightful little unopenable steel-mesh bags they give you on flights, you know, the ones containing seven desiccated peanuts, two Rice Chex, a shoestring pretzel and 19 sunflower seeds, all sand-blasted with industrial-strength ceramic glaze salt. The trick is to serve it exactly 35 minutes before or 35 minutes after giving you your regulation three ounces of Diet Coke with melted ice.

But no, it turns out it's called "Snakes on a Plane," though the irony is that it really is about snacks on a plane. The snacks would be the crew and passengers of Pacific Flight 121, who are Vienna cocktail sausages for about 300 creepy, oozy, squiggly, slithery reptiles. (Question: Why would it be easier to smuggle 300 snakes aboard an airliner than one bomb?) They bite nearly everyone in all the predictable places that a 13-year-old would find "funny."

The movie's highest level of artistic expression was the ingenious Internet campaign that catapulted it to culture phenom months before it even opened. The thing itself turns out to be pretty much an afterthought, cheesy and not very well worked out.

--Stephen Hunter (Aug. 18, 2006) Contains intense scenes of terror and violence, some gore, profanity and some nudity.