It’s a wonder that Gerard Butler is able to purchase any insurance. After all, bad things seem to happen to him, or at least his screen persona, all the time. Whether he’s playing a Secret Service agent or an Everyman, Butler can’t seem to avoid getting in more tight spots than anyone since Bruce Willis’ John McClane. In his newest film, Plane, Butler plays an airline pilot, so you can rest assured that his flight is not going to go smoothly.

Fortunately for moviegoers, the veteran Scottish actor is an engaging, charismatic presence, and Plane is the sort of breathlessly paced suspenser that barely leaves a moment for audiences to stop suspending their disbelief.

The film dispenses with backstory, save for a brief introductory phone conversation between pilot Brodie Torrance (Butler) and his teenage daughter (Haleigh Hekking) as he’s rushing through airport security. It’s New Year’s Eve, which perhaps accounts for the fact that the plane is one of the least crowded in aviation history, with little more than a dozen passengers. Even more incongruously, all of them are relatively young and in good shape (not an elderly person in sight), which makes them well-suited for the action-movie machinations that ensue. Among their ranks is Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter), a handcuffed prisoner being extradited for a murder charge who’s escorted by an armed FBI agent.

Thanks to an airline executive more interested in saving money than allowing the plane to make a detour to avoid inclement weather, Brodie and his young co-pilot (Yoson An, Mulan) soon find themselves flying through a severe storm. When a lightning strike cuts the plane’s power, they’re forced to make a miraculous emergency landing. The problem is that they’ve landed on a small island in the Philippines controlled by separatist rebels, with the airline having no idea where they are.

Cue the violent mayhem, in which a take-charge Brodie has to protect his passengers from the terrorists intent on kidnapping them and either holding them for ransom or killing them, probably both. He forms an uneasy alliance with Gaspare, who conveniently happens to be a former member of the French Foreign Legion and clearly knows his way around commando tactics. Meanwhile, the airline brings in an experienced troubleshooter (Tony Goldwyn), a former Special Forces operative, who promptly hires a team of veteran mercenaries to perform a rescue mission. (If only Southwest Airlines was run with that sort of brutal efficiency.)

It’s all ridiculous hokum, with the villainous rebels led by the sort of head honcho who screams “Wake up the island!” when he wants to make sure that he has plenty of forces at his disposal. But director Jean-Francois Richet (the Mesrine films) orchestrates the violent mayhem with impressive skill, infusing the action sequences with a spatial coherency that makes them genuinely exciting, especially a hand-to-hand fight scene shot in a single take in which Brodie and a terrorist pummel each other for two punishing minutes.

Screenwriters Charles Cumming and J.P. David provide a solid narrative structure, mostly avoiding cliches save for some stereotypical characterizations such as the requisite a-hole passenger (played by Joey Slotnick, who’s made a specialty of this sort of thing) and a couple of young women constantly glued to their phones. They even manage to infuse some genuine emotionalism into the fast-paced proceedings, especially with the growing mutual respect and rapport between Brodie and his unlikely ally, at whose motivations we’re constantly guessing.

By now, Butler is an expert at conveying an effective combination of badassery and vulnerability, making his character’s heroics convincing. Colter has physical presence to spare as the enigmatic Gaspare, and Goldwyn clearly seems to be having a good time as the sort of no-nonsense executive who makes it clear he’s superior to everyone else in the room.

The banally titled Plane doesn’t exactly break new cinematic ground, feeling like the sort of routine actioner that might have starred Rod Taylor and Jim Brown back in the ‘60s. But it gets the job done, which is more than you can say for most genre films these days.