The McBournie Minute: Get ready for the return flight

Last week I was scrolling through the channels because my cable box was having issues downloading program info. It was like being back in 1996. I had to scroll through the channels not pressing the page up/page down buttons, but the channel up/channel down ones instead.

I stopped at FX, because they are generally good to me, after all, they brought us the greatest show about Denis Leary’s stand-up world this side of The Job. But tonight’s fare was not quite at that level. Instead I got the last half hour of Snakes on a Plane. I know it was cool four years ago for blogs to be all excited about this movie, but really, it’s a second-rate action flick that’s never sure if it’s supposed to be sarcastic or not.

Naturally, I watched it.

I even got in in time for Samuel L. Jackson’s famous (if not edited) line: “That is it! I have had it with these monkey fighting snakes on this Monday-to-Friday plane!” Those of you who follow me on Twitter know where I’m going with this.

I realized that this wasn’t just editing out the mofo word, this was foreshadowing a sequel. I called up a few of my friends in Hollywood, and yes, I got the script for Snakes on a Plane 2 (working title). Amazingly enough, it is about exactly what Agent Neville Flynn alluded to in his awkwardly timed-rant.

I’ll try not to include any spoilers in here, but it picks up about a year or so after the first movie. When Flynn (Jackson) shot out a window on Pacific Air Flight 121 all of the snakes on board were sucked out into the Pacific Ocean just offshore of Los Angeles. What Flynn did not realize is that many species of snake can swim. Those that survived the splash down swam to shore, where they were free to begin again.

Elthred the Python can’t sleep through a night since the Neville incident. He is haunted by the screams of his fellow snakes as they were pulled out of the aircraft, many of them to meet their deaths. He had boarded that plane thinking it would be like the countless other times he had been illegally transported. For a while, it was fun eating people. But Elthred has lived in regret ever since.

After swimming ashore, he had trouble fitting in. The local snake population looked at him as a freak, the state put a bounty on his head for being an “invasive species” not native to the California coast. So he hit the bottle. Hard. He nearly drank himself to death. In fact, it was only the survived one night because the mouse he swallowed whole was still alive in his gut and drank some of the whiskey, too. It was a wake-up call for him.

It was about that time that Elthred heard that Pacific Air had soaring popularity. People wanted the “snakes on a plane” experience, which was offered only on flights Monday through Friday because of snake union requirements. Like most adventures, it was soon bastardized by lawyers, who made the snakes sit in a glass cage. They were then introduced to monkeys, who the snakes soon found out they would be forced to fight to the death.

Desperate, Elthred applied and was accepted. He was even given a hero status as a Flight 121 veteran. Running from his past, drowning in the screams of all the chimps, macaques and capuchins he has been forced to kill to make enough to survive, he finds Susie, an anaconda with a thing for trying to fix the bad boys.

Will Elthred be able to face down his demons and clean himself up for Susie, or will he just end up eating her? Will this exotic snake ever find his place in the world? Can he find the courage within himself to forgive Flynn for ruining his life?

Summer of 2010, get ready to find out, monkey fighter.