Fangs, nipples and screaming

Snakes.
(pause)
On A Plane.

That's how the opening credits come up, and that's what happens. Useless whining surfer loser witnesses some Golden Triangle sociopath icing a US lawyer in Hawaii. Samuel The Man gets the surfer on a plane to L.A. so he can testify (Testify, my chillun!!!) against the baddie. But baddie has his goons on the inside and they stuff the cargo hold full of snakies. They also spray the Hawaiian leis in the hold with pheromones so that the snakes will get all hepped up on goofballs and go crazy on people's ass. As Sam The Man says at one point: "Oh great. Snakes on crack".

So, there's the usual crowd of misfits who either die, or not, by the venom. The first two to go are the hot young couple joining the mile-high club (while smoking a joint: classy) in the loo. A few gratuitous shots of clutching fingers and bare nipples, and the cobras come in through the smoke detector hole. The two later are seen as an entwined and solid mass of purplish engorged swollen flesh. Getting all film-analysis theory for a sec, the ones who have sex are always the first to die. Think Scream, IKWYDLS, Final Destination and so on. Apparently some sort of puritan US filmic symbolism.
So. We've got the single mother with baby (lives), the two unaccompanied minors (of course they live), the obnoxious British businessman (boa constrictor), the cute flight attendant who's on her last ever trip (lives and hooks up with the surfer), the older lady flight attendant (cobra), the megastar hypochondriac black rapper and his two stooges (live / live / gets bit in the ass) the ditzy blonde with chihuahua (lives / gets eaten), the bimbo flight attendant with the cleavage (lives, unfortunately) and the fear-of-flying young honeymooner and his tanned honeymooner wife (copperheads).

Back to the film theory, there's a fat old mama lady with the hooker makeup and the hip flask who sits snoring and farting away while the snakes are getting bizzay in the cabin. One of the big juicy snakes slithers up her dress and mooches around in there for a while. She's all moaning and groaning and dreaming away (gee, didn't see the snake / penis joke coming) and as a result she gets bit in the eyeball. The guy in the toilets who talks to his penis and calls it "big boy" (ew) is too busy enjoying himself to notice the Asian Brown in the toilet bowl, and that's the end of him. Sexual enjoyment = punishment by death: sexual restraint = win against the baddies and hook up with the hero for some nice old-fashioned hand-holding and waiting till your wedding night.
Whatever.

One of the stooges ends up having to land the jet, armed only with over 2000 hours of Flight Simulator on PS2. A handful of key plot people live. Everybody else dies. Sam the Man gets to run around dispatching reptiles with deodorant flame-throwers, sporks (not really), axes, stun guns and switchblades. He doesn't say the killer line till about three quarters of the way through:

"I have HAD it with these motherfucking snakes, on this motherfucking plane!"

As well as animal-wrangler, there is reference in the credits to snake fabricators, animatronics, animators, special effects, sculptors, motion sensors, puppeteers and CGI. Nice work, kids. Good movie.