It's crude. It's gory. It gleefully travels well beyond traditional standards of decency. But it's also... quite a lot of fun, the most, in fact, you're likely to have at a cinema this year. You've seen the trailers, the interviews, and the fan-made t-shirts. Now brace yourself for the silliest motion picture in recent memory: director David Ellis' Snakes on a Plane, an action/horror/comedy film best viewed in the company of friends, or at least with an audience whose level of excitement for the film defies all logic and reason, as it was at the screening I attended.

Star Samuel L. Jackson has unabashedly embraced his charge of promoting the film, appearing on talk shows and even lending his voice to a website allowing personalized exhortations to be sent to "friends." And to think, he signed on without even reading the script. That unbridled enthusiasm is clearly evident in the product itself; he delivers each line – and he has all the best ones – with an incredulous conviction I couldn't help but chortle (and holler) at, over and over again.

The other actors are all on board as well, with standouts including Julianna Margulies' spunky flight attendant and Rachel Blanchard's spoiled, chihuahua-toting heiress. There are few jokes qua jokes, but with a title and premise such as this film has and a score so melodramatic you might think this was a soap opera – we have composer Trevor Rabin to thank for that – humor is never far below the surface of any scene herein.

Passengers and flight crew alike are all disposable once the carnage begins, and Jackson's FBI agent character, Nelville Flynn, is the only man who can stop tough-guy mobster Eddie Kim's (Byron Lawson) sinister plot to keep surfer kid Sean (Nathan Phillips) from testifying against him by unleashing a deadly crate of snakes on the unsuspecting members of Pacific Air Flight 121.