Y’all need a pilot? It’s time for Mark Wahlberg and Mel Gibson to continue their string of collaborations. These two previously co-starred in the two Daddy’s Home movies and the 2022 biographical drama Father Stu, and now, Gibson steps behind the camera to direct Wahlberg in Flight Risk. This action thriller features Michelle Dockery as Madelyn Harris, a Deputy U.S. Marshal who must transfer a witness named Winston (Topher Grace) to trial. But when the pilot, played by Wahlberg, reveals himself to be a hitman, she must get Winston to safety.
Flight Risk is fun at times but ultimately ends up as a mediocre attempt at a popcorn movie. It’s fascinating that Gibson returned to the director’s chair for this film. Most of his other directorial efforts (Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto, Hacksaw Ridge) were more grandiose, earning Oscar nominations. This movie sure won’t be getting any awards, nor is it trying to. Gibson’s approach to this movie is straightforward fun. He’s aiming to make a blockbuster, adapting writer Jared Rosenberg’s script into a one-location action thriller.
While many will think of a movie like Non-Stop to compare this airplane action film with, Flight Risk also contains similarities to the 2020 Joseph Gordon-Levitt thriller 7500 and last year’s criminally underrated South Korean film Hijack 1971. But this movie does not work as well as others in this genre. The premise of two characters trapped on a plane with a hitman is gripping on paper. They’re trapped in a moving vehicle, neither of them know how to fly a plane, and the only person who can fly it is a murderous lunatic hell-bent on killing them both. While parts of this film offer the excitement you’d expect, it’s a surprisingly inconsistent film.
The first act of Flight Risk is fine. Topher Grace has always been a nice presence in movies and TV, and he does some Eric Forman levels of sarcasm as Winston. He’s fed up with Madelyn early on and she’s not exactly a fan of his either. Soon enough, Marky Mark arrives on the plane, replacing his signature Boston accent with a thick Southern drawl. There’s some wonderful tension here as Winston discovers that this pilot is not who he says he is and tries desperately to get Madelyn on the same page as him.
After the pilot reveals himself as a hitman, he is quickly subdued. Here we have the first issue with the film: the good guys are winning for far too much of the story. Even though Wahlberg is the face of all the marketing, he spends most of the film handcuffed in the background. A good point of reference for why this movie doesn’t work very well is the 1994 movie Speed. That’s another film that has our characters trapped in a moving vehicle. But the villain in that movie is always winning, and the good guys are always in danger. Here, the villain is sitting down, tormenting them verbally but physically unable to put them in any danger.
It’s still nice to see Wahlberg as a bad guy. He hasn’t had a lot of villainous roles since his 1996 movie Fear, often playing the hero in his action roles like The Family Plan, Uncharted, and Infinite (which I don’t think is as bad as people say, by the way). He gets to play the most mustache-twirling villain ever here, and he’s not bad. His character hurts and kills because he has fun doing it, just like it seems as if Wahlberg is having a blast in this role. His character isn’t very interesting because he’s the most one-dimensional evil guy ever, but Wahlberg is really swinging for the fences here.
But let’s go back to Speed—that movie works so well because while they’re driving that bus, they’re constantly facing obstacles, from traffic to schoolchildren to a baby carriage full of cans. Flight Risk works whenever it does that, but there are moments where the momentum vanishes and the danger subsides. Madelyn does not know how to fly a plane at first, but she gets the hang of it too quickly, and the screenplay doesn’t take advantage of her inability.
It can sometimes feel like Flight Risk is a dumb movie trying to disguise itself as a smart one. While this is your straightforward actioner, there are some questionable writing choices. For example, the hitman pulls a knife on the heroes early on. Somehow, both Madelyn and Winston completely forget about the knife, while I was mentally screaming at them both to find it and stop it from getting back into the hitman’s hands. There’s also a very contrived plot point that requires Madelyn to put on an article of clothing for no reason and then somehow not notice that it goes missing. It’s an idea necessary to increase the stakes in the later half of the film, but Madelyn’s ignorance of everything simply made me feel like she was terrible at her job.
Overall, Flight Risk never fully takes off. There’s a subplot surrounding events happening on the ground, but the film only has us hear these events rather than see it so that we can stay in the claustrophobic plane. It can be challenging to connect with these other events and characters as a result. This movie had potential, but it gets held back by a lot of ineffective humor, attempts at crowd-pleasing moments that don’t please crowds and Wahlberg being incapacitated for the majority of the runtime, repeating some variation of, “I’m gonna hurt you, and I’ll enjoy it!”
SCORE: 5/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 5 equates to “Mediocre.” The positives and negatives wind up negating each other, making it a wash.
Disclosure: ComingSoon attended a press screening for our Flight Risk review.
