‘Flight Risk’ Review: A Rather Bumpy Landing (original) (raw)
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Mel Gibson directs an uneven action film with Mark Wahlberg that feels pulled out of an earlier era.
Mark Wahlberg plays Daryl, a pilot with a hidden agenda, in “Flight Risk,” directed by Mel Gibson.Credit...Lionsgate
Jan. 23, 2025
Flight Risk
Directed by Mel Gibson
Action, Crime, Drama, Thriller
R
1h 31m
In my household we have a regular ritual we call “bad movie night.” We pull together snacks and a couple of beers, then fire up a doubleheader of movies that give license to turn off our brains for a couple of hours. It’s probably unfair to call them “bad” movies, because we don’t really mean they are shoddy; they’re just hacky. Complete predictability is key to the genre — plots with no real surprises, acting that’s purely sufficient, effects that are corny but passably cool, at least a few head-slapping lines. An amusement-park ride, basically, but from the comfort of the couch.
This is precisely the kind of entertainment that the airborne action movie “Flight Risk” aims to be. It feels directly dragged out of the 1980s and early 1990s, a time when Hollywood was devoted to turning out swarms of action flicks in which some flawed and downtrodden but good-hearted hero thwarts a devious conspiracy or an impending alien invasion or whatever. At that time executives also seemed convinced that you needed a love interest for people to be invested, so some kind of flirtation was awkwardly shoehorned in alongside the completely foreseeable twists and turns.
In “Flight Risk,” Jared Rosenberg’s screenplay traps its three stars for most of the 91-minute running time in a small plane high above a snowy Alaskan landscape. Madolyn Harris (Michelle Dockery), a U.S. marshal, needs to bring an informant named Winston (Topher Grace) from a remote location to New York, but their pilot (Mark Wahlberg) turns out to have other plans.
That’s basically everything you need to know about the movie. The rest plays out as a series of little fights in the plane, interspersed between close shaves with mountain peaks, a couple of uninteresting revelations about those on board (Wahlberg’s character being bald under his hat is treated as a major shocker) and a lot of stupid tactical choices by the marshal, who really ought to know better.
The strangest twist on offer in “Flight Risk” is that its director is Mel Gibson, whose part in the project seems to have been purposely downplayed by its distributor, Lionsgate. The poster only proclaims that the movie is from the “award-winning director” of “Braveheart,” “Apocalypto” and “Hacksaw Ridge,” with his name in tiny text near the bottom — an odd choice given that Gibson was once one of the industry’s most bankable actors and recognizable names.
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