Jodie Foster loses her cool in

In my next life, I want Jodie Foster to be my mother. (Sorry, Mom.) In her last two major films, David Fincher's Panic Room and the new thrill-free thriller Flightplan, from the German director Robert Schwentke, this awards- bedecked actress has played the world's most ferocious single mother who, forced to protect her only daughter, swats bad men like flies. In between these two films, Foster delivered a gemstone performance in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Very Long Engagement, as a married woman who turns to a stranger to become pregnant. In the film she made before Panic Room, the independent scrap The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, she played a Catholic nun, Sister Assumpta.

Performers take roles for all sorts of reasons, and perhaps one day a cinema studies student will proffer a dissertation on the roles recently favored by Foster. Until then, there are only the films to consider, though as of late they have not been worth much consideration.

Written by Peter Dowling and Billy Ray, Flightplan fuses the woman-in- jeopardy flick and the paranoid woman's film. Although these types of stories often overlap -- the paranoid woman is always in jeopardy, if only in her head, as in Hitchcock's Suspicion -- not every woman in jeopardy is necessarily paranoid. She's just the means to a larger end, a single piece in a complicated puzzle. She is often also a total screaming pain.

In Flightplan, Foster plays Kyle, an American propulsion engineer making her way from Berlin to New York with her husband's body in the hold. Also in hand is Kyle's six-year-old daughter, Julia (Marlene Lawston), a sober little beauty still visibly shaken by her father's recent death.

After some story preliminaries -- a creepy trip to the morgue, a creepier stroll down memory lane -- mother and daughter board their flight. Soon thereafter, the lights dim, and Kyle and Julia each stretch out in an empty row. Just when you think it might be time to join them, Kyle wakes and discovers that Julia has gone missing, vanished without apparent trace. Well, not entirely: left behind are a stuffed animal, Julia's passport and a clue borrowed from another Hitchcock thriller, The Lady Vanishes.

What follows is a protracted search, some shameless nods to Sept. 11 and a lot of crying. To watch Foster storm through a phony airplane for an entire movie has its very minor pleasures -- given the numerous close-ups, you can study her lovely face at your leisure -- but there is nothing here to feed the head or fray the nerves. And while the crew and the passengers are not on Kyle's side (they think she's nuts), Foster's stardom, as well as the filmmaking, ensure that the audience most definitely is, which wreaks havoc on the suspense. All that the restless viewer can do is marvel at the snazzy production design and the strange elocution of Foster's co-star, Peter Sarsgaard (as a sky marshal), who serves up his lines as if he had studied at the John Malkovich school of cinematic expediency.