Entertainment

Flying high

Denzel Washington will get an Oscar nom for his portrayal of an alcohol-fueled pilot.

Don’t expect to be watching “Flight’’ on your next airplane trip. Besides showcasing one of Denzel Washington’s finest performances, it features perhaps the scariest sequence ever set on a stricken commercial aircraft as Washington’s crack pilot miraculously lands a disabled plane with minimal loss of life.

That 20-minute white-knuckle sequence — which includes Washington’s character, Whip Whitaker, flipping the plane upside down to pull out of a tailspin — is by far the most effective part of director Robert Zemeckis’ first live-action film since the underrated “Cast Away’’ 12 years ago.

But things get more complicated, and more than a bit cheesy, when a routine toxicology test reveals what we’ve already seen: Whip was legally intoxicated before he boarded the plane — and had snorted some cocaine to steady his nerves, polishing off a couple of miniature vodkas just before takeoff.

Fortunately for Whip — who faces a long prison stretch for involuntary manslaughter if intoxication is proved — the pilots’ union has supplied him with a crack criminal lawyer.

Attorney Hugh Lang, played with cold-blooded pragmatism by Don Cheadle, quickly finds a legal loophole: The hospital where Whip’s blood was tested during his recovery did not calibrate its equipment on the required schedule — so Hugh can get the test tossed as inadmissible.

The bigger problem for Hugh is getting Whip — hailed as another Sully Sullenberger for an emergency landing in a field outside Atlanta that we’re told 10 other pilots failed to duplicate in simulations — to behave himself until the end of the National Transportation Safety Board hearing on the crash.

Alcoholics can be notoriously self-destructive, particularly when they feel guilty (while 96 survived, a handful of passengers and crew members didn’t). But even under the circumstances, Whip’s behavior seems a bit over the top for someone who’s clearly spent his most of his adult life hiding the extent of his problem.

After a remorseful attempt at sobriety at the farm of his late father — a former Tuskegee Airman during World War II — Whip hooks up with Nicole (Kelly Reilly), a junkie he meets up with in the hospital where’s she was recovering from an overdose.

He quickly falls off the wagon and spirals way out of control. Washington, who will likely receive a Best Actor nomination for this Oscar-bait part, is a strong enough actor to get you past most of the eyebrow-raising twists (like a stormy reunion with Whip’s ex-wife and son that makes no sense at all) in John Gatins’ rambling screenplay.

The beloved Oscar winner (for “Training Day’’) might even get you to buy the dubious suggestion that Whip might have managed his landing precisely because he was blitzed. But even he can’t sell one of the year’s most preposterous, schmaltzy and out-of-left-field endings.

It doesn’t help that Zemeckis — who devoted more than a decade on dubious projects with motion-capture “animation’’ like “The Polar Express’’ — doesn’t always seem to trust his star to put over the material.

As a result, we get cornball touches like Whip’s plane clipping a church steeple during his miracle landing, which narrowly misses an outdoor baptism. And a laughable scene where the mini-bar in an adjoining hotel suite almost literally calls out to Whip during a crucial evening.

To be fair, there are some very good things besides Washington’s committed performance — not many actors could deliver a line like, “Don’t tell me how to lie about my drinking!’’ the way he does — and that terrifying flight sequence.

There’s fine supporting work by John Goodman as Whip’s chipper cocaine supplier, Bruce Greenwood as his exasperated union rep/enabler and Melissa Leo, who ends up with little more than a glorified cameo at the NTSB hearing.

But it’s all those hokey touches that keep “Flight’’ from being a very good movie instead of a very entertaining one.