Trailers of Flightplan merged images of Panic Room with The Forgotten, and that’s a very appropriate description of this thriller. In Panic Room, Jodie Foster is a protective mom who rummages through a large house in an effort to outwit burglars trying to kill her and her daughter. In The Forgotten, Julianne Moore is a mother desperate to find a son her friends and family say doesn’t exist. In Flightplan, Foster’s character ends up trying to convince an entire planeload of people that the daughter she brought aboard actually exists.

Kyle Pratt (Foster) is an aviation engineer whose husband has just died from a terrible fall off the roof of their apartment in Berlin. Distraught and alone, Kyle and her 6-year-old daughter, Julia (Marlene Lawston), decide to leave Berlin immediately and accompany the casket back to the United States.

Ironically, the Pratts end up on a new super sized state-of-the-art airplane, one that Kyle just happened to help design. Shortly after take-off, Kyle -- totally exhausted from the trauma in her life -- and Julia decide to move to the back of the plane in order to stretch out for a nap in two empty rows.  Upon awaking, Kyle finds that Julia is gone. What starts as a mild-mannered search for the young girl, soon turns to panic when no one remembers ever seeing the child, and the flight crew becomes insistent that Kyle take her seat and behave.

Just as in Panic Room, Foster’s maternal instincts kick into high gear. She zooms through the plane barely escaping the grasp of attendants and accusing passengers who look suspicious of stealing her daughter. When Captain Rich (Sean Bean) decides Kyle is a flight risk, he has Air Marshal Gene Carson (Peter Sarsgaard) step in. Carson immediately takes physical control of Kyle, but cannot suppress her emotional drive to find her daughter. Like a hurricane-force rain, she assaults him with one scenario or plea after another.

The pilot and the marshal show their empathy for Kyle when they learn about the death of her husband. Without mentioning any spoilers, let’s just say that from this point on the film moves wholeheartedly into implausible territory with more plot holes than a major golf course. People walking out of the theater kept up a barrage of “how-come” questions.

The action and intense intrigue -- is there a daughter or not? --could have made a great film. Flightplan is not a good movie, and it’s especially disappointing considering Foster’s penchant to choose her material wisely as well as producer Brian Grazer’s (A Beautiful Mind, Apollo13) incredible moviemaking skills. There were several different writers (Peter Dowling and Billy Ray) on the project that began before 9/11. That length of delay and too many hands involved in this film may have added to its problems. I also feel the fact that director Robert Schwentke has had little feature film experience contributed to the unevenness of the story.

Unfortunately, the best part of Flightplan is the airplane, which exists only on film.

(Released by Touchstone Pictures and rated “PG-13” for violence and some intense plot material.)

Read Diana Saenger’s reviews of classic films at http://classicfilm.about.com.