The Con Air Museum of Con‑temporary Art

When my cousin came home from the Army, he flew into Atlanta and his mother picked him up in a Pontiac that smelled of cigarettes and ambition. This, I am told, is standard. Cameron Poe, decorated Army Ranger, instead returns from war aboard a working tugboat, chugging across the Gulf toward a dive bar, as though the Department of Defense travel office had shrugged and said, “See what the harbor has available.”

No one on screen finds this odd. The tugboat is never explained and never mentioned again. It simply delivers a Ranger to a bar the way a barge delivers gravel, and the film moves on, leaving the rest of us alone with the water.

In the Alabama of this film, defending your pregnant wife from three drunks in a rain-soaked parking lot is a felony, and being an excellent soldier is an aggravating factor. The judge explains that Poe’s training makes his body a deadly weapon, the way one might scold a surgeon for stabbing precisely.

He is then shipped two thousand miles west to serve his Alabama sentence in a California penitentiary, a jurisdictional arrangement known to no legal scholar and one bailiff’s fever dream. The reason, of course, is that the plot had already purchased nonrefundable tickets out of Oakland.

Oakland to Carson City is, by air, roughly the length of a nap. The film stretches it to feature length. The Jailbird departs in daylight, stages a mutiny, holds negotiations, lands in the desert, refuels, takes off again, and still finds spare hours of sky, circling one time zone like a man who refuses to ask for directions.

Nevada, I feel obligated to note, is adjacent to California. You can practically see it from the tarmac. At the speeds depicted, the plane should have crossed the Atlantic. Instead it hangs overhead all afternoon, less an aircraft than a weather system with a cast.

For one shining moment, the movie knows what it is. Garland Greene — a serial killer written with the menace of a scented candle and performed by Steve Buscemi as though auditioning for a nap — watches the convicts boogie to “Sweet Home Alabama” and observes that celebrating aboard an aircraft, to a song by a band whose story ended in a plane crash, is perhaps ironic.

It is the smartest observation anyone makes in 115 minutes, and the film assigns it to the character we are meant to find the most deranged. He later attends a tea party with a small child in a drained swimming pool, which the movie offers as whimsy, and which I offer to my therapist.

Vince Larkin, U.S. Marshal and the film’s only licensed adult, finishes a meeting with Poe’s wife and then drives a borrowed Corvette to Lerner Airfield, in the middle of the desert, arriving before the airplane. The airplane. Which flies.

The Corvette is later lashed to that same plane, hoisted into the sky, and dropped onto the desert floor — a sequence the film intends as comedy and which I choose to read as the vehicle’s formal resignation. It had outrun an aircraft that morning. There was nothing left to prove.

The Jailbird crash-lands on the Las Vegas Strip, shearing through marquees, storefronts, and an amount of infrastructure normally discussed in congressional hearings. Fatalities among the public: none the film cares to mention. Vegas absorbs a cargo plane the way a sofa absorbs a dropped remote.

Waiting at the edge of the debris stand Tricia and Casey Poe who, having recently toured California, are now in Nevada, positioned at the precise terminus of an uncontrolled crash, as though the plane had filed its skid with the city in advance. Poe hands his daughter the bunny. Behind them, something that used to be a casino files its own paperwork.

The film ends, and where a lesser movie might account for its loose ends, this one deals them in. Garland Greene — introduced with restraints, a hand truck, and warnings normally reserved for plutonium, credited with a body count in the thirties — simply strolls out of the wreckage and into a casino, where we find him at the craps table. Winning.

How did he get there? The movie does not say. Why is he free? The movie does not ask. The most dangerous man in the American prison system bets the pass line, throws a four and a three, and is granted the ending usually reserved for golden retrievers, and the audience is invited to smile, because he once attended a tea party and seemed tired. The house edge on the pass line is 1.41 percent; the odds of this epilogue are considerably worse, and still it hits. Somewhere, a parole board sleeps soundly, unaware it was ever in this film.