YMMV / Snakes on a Plane

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Tiffany telling Sean that him being a witness for the prosecution is "hot" after making him uncomfortable by talking about Eddie Kim's evil deeds. Maybe she's trying to make him feel less nervous by flirting more openly.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Troy mentions having played an unspecified flight simulator on a PlayStation console and uses that experience to land the plane safely. The "flew a passenger jet on a Sony system" part might seem farfetched to Western gamers, but not really for Japanese viewers and Westerners who import Japanese games due to the existence of Taito's Jet de Go! series series of airliner flight simulators, an installment of which was available on every PlayStation system at the time (Jet de Go! for PS1 in 2000, Jet de Go! 2 for PS2 in 2002, and Jet de Go! Pocket for PSP in 2005). Of course, it would still be a bit of a stretch to believe that training through those games is as good as formal instruction.
• Awesome Music:
  • "Snakes on a Plane (Bring It)" by Gabe Saporta, before he founded Cobra Starship (in fact, the reason the band was named Cobra Starship was because he thought this would be a one-off alias for this soundtrack). It also features Maja Ivarsson from The Sounds, William Becket from The Academy Is... and Travis McCoy from Gym Class Heroes. The music video is pretty awesome too.
  • There's also Cee Lo Green's Ophidiophobia.
• Base-Breaking Character: The businessman who feeds a dog to the python. As mentioned in Moral Event Horizon, many were upset at the scene & found the man's subsequent death cheerful. But there's another portion of fandom who feel said man was justified in sacrificing an animal to save his own life. It can and has sparked heated debate on animal vs. human life value.
• Complete Monster: Eddie Kim is a feared international crime boss who, in his very first scene, beats a guy prosecuting him to death with a baseball bat, taunting him about how his son will grow up without a father. Then, to kill the witness to his crime, he releases the titular snakes on the plane, killing dozens of people without a twinge of remorse for either the passengers killed by an entire swarm of venomous serpents or any potential collateral damage for a plane crash.
• Critical Dissonance: Ironically, professional critics enjoyed this campy film more than audiences did according to Rotten Tomatoes. As of March 2023, 69% of 180 critics gave the film a positive review, but just 49% of over 250,000 audience ratings were positive. You read that right, a slight majority of audiences disliked the film more than they liked it.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Mean businessman getting a Karmic Death by hungry python - after he had a Kick the Dog moment by throwing a defenseless chihuahua to the snakes - is hilarious.
  • The snake going up the sleeping woman's skirt, causing her to have...pleasant dreams is darkly hilarious.
  • Oversexed couple getting killed in the bathroom and the woman getting bitten on her giant tits? Hilarious. Ditto to the obnoxious guy who talks to his dick dying by a snake biting him.
  • During the mass attack, one of the snakes takes a break from trying to kill the passengers and tries mating with a lei.
• Ham and Cheese: Many people were initially surprised at Samuel L. Jackson agreeing to work on a movie like this.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Ten years after its release, an actual snake was spotted on a plane. Though thankfully there were no injuries.
  • A guy getting his groin bitten by a snake is hilarious and harsh in the same time. Fast forward to 2021, there's an accident where a Dutch man got bitten by a cobra while using a toilet in an African safari, while his life was saved, he's going to live with the fact that his penis has been scarred due to extensive operations which cost him a lot of money and his memory forever haunted with the fact that a snake bit him in his private parts. You can laugh at the event happening in a movie that's deliberately So Bad, It's Good, but the event sure isn't funny stuff for the man or anyone unfortunate enough to have such an encounter.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The fact that Samuel L. Jackson is reporting directly to a superior who looks and sounds like Barack Obama should count.
  • Julianna Margulies plays a flight attendant who's leaving to start law school. She later played a lawyer in the short-lived Canterbury's Law and in the much more successful The Good Wife.
  • Nathan Philips's last scene in Wolf Creek shows him being taken onboard a plane to be part of a murder investigation. Here's hoping that flight didn't have the same problems.
  • A year after starring in this film, Samuel L. Jackson notably voiced God in an audio version of the Bible. He just can't catch a break with snakes, can he?
    "Enough is enough! I have had it with this muthafuckin' snake in this muthafuckin' garden!"
  • As Honest Trailers humorously noted, this would not be the last time that Elsa Pataky played a new mom whose baby is in extreme danger on a plane.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Most viewers were just here to watch Samuel L. Jackson get mad about mothafuckin' snakes on a muthafuckin' plane.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Almost exemplified with Jackson's now (in)famous One-Liner: "Enough is enough! I have had it with these muthafuckin' snakes on this muthafuckin' plane!" The line was written by fans online and placed into the movie as an Ascended Meme.
    • The sanitized TV version of the line became a meme itself for its sheer absurdity. "I have had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday-to-Friday plane!"
  • The title of the movie itself led to many variants, such as "Snakes on a Tit", "Snakes on a Dick", etc.
  • Some people have put pictures of snakes on plane graphs.
  • Pick any Metal Gear protagonists (named with variations of Snake) and put them on a plane. Slap the movie's title on it. Instant meme.
  • This also works with Harry Potter: "Snapes on a plane".
  • A non-title based meme can also be found in a certain Product Placement: "ALL PRAISES TO THE PLAYSTATION!!"
• Moral Event Horizon: Kudos to the unnamed businessman who killed the dog in order to save his own skin. This allows the audience to feel no sympathy and revel when the python slowly eats him and gets sucked out of the plane while he's halfway eaten.
• Narm Charm:
  • The movie is just so silly, but that makes it better.
  • The poster logo looks like it was whipped up in five minutes with Microsoft WordArt...which is exactly the sort of charm that fits a movie with such a silly title.
  • The title and premise of the movie seem silly, but it doesn't stop the part where the snakes attack the passengers from being genuinely terrifying to many viewers.
• One-Scene Wonder: The martial artist. People wished he got more scenes.
• Paranoia Fuel: The idea of snakes getting released onto a plane where you can't escape them is pretty unnerving.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Taylor Kitsch dies while having sex early on in the film, in one of his first film roles.
  • The actress playing the lady who nearly loses her baby, Elsa Pataky, would go on to play Elena Neves.
  • Agent Harris’s actor would later go on to play Van Pelt in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.
• So Bad, It's Good: Almost certainly an intentional example.
  • The director initially wanted a more serious movie with "Snakes on a Plane" being a working title, but after seeing the title, Jackson requested to keep it and everything it entails. With all the free internet hype for a Ham and Cheese B-movie (and no interest otherwise), it was probably a wise decision as the original would likely fall into no better than So Okay, It's Average.
  • The song above is so god awful in the lyrics and video that by rights it should tank, but Cobra Starship are so self aware of how bad it is that given the tone of the film they pull it off.
• Signature Scene: Sam Jackson declaring "I have had it with these muthafuckin' snakes on this muthafuckin' plane!".
• Squick: The scene with the poor guy who gets a woman's broken heel lodged in his ear and has blood pouring down his face while being simultaneously trampled by a panicking crowd is enough to turn many a viewer's stomach.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Eddie Kim, evil gangster martial artist? Check. Heroic kickboxer who risks his own life to save a stranger? Check. Shoehorning in a Hong Kong-esque fight at or near the end? ...Not check.
• Tough Act to Follow: For a good year before the film was released, it received a ton of memes. For some, the memes were more entertaining than the film itself, although that's not to say the actual film was bad, just that the memes were so funny.
• Ugly Cute: The snakes in some scenes. Special mention goes to the one that pounces on and wraps itself around a lei necklace.
• Watch It for the Meme: Watch it to see SLJ have enough with these muthafuckin' snakes on this muthafuckin' plane. And also because of the title itself.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Someone on the Malaysian censorship board decided to grant the film the U Rating (Universal rating, meaning that it is suitable for everyone, even babies), apparently because the title of the movie sounds like it's a clean family comedy outing. It was eventually reclassified as a 18+ movie, but not before a horde of angry parents wrote in to the local press complaining. The Censor? He's most likely out of a job.

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