You might think that cinema is all about the arty pictures, the Oscar bait, the moody period dramas and the auteur-driven space operas. But you’d be mistaken: It’s the more unheralded heroes of film that have kept the medium alive for more than a century – stuff like Flight Risk, a “dumb concept, great execution” thriller from a once celebrated, now disgraced filmmaker that toes the line just so between goofy and earnest. It’s low budget, stars actors you may or may not recognize, and delivers the type of brainless amusement you’d expect from Mark Wahlberg doing wacky accent work in a close-quarters nail-biter directed by Mel Gibson. Not a Great Film by any means, but enough dumb fun to be worth the price of admission.
The story is simple enough. Winston (Topher Grace), a bespectacled fugitive with connections to some big bad crime boss, is collared in a remote Alaskan town by steely U.S. Marshal Madelyn (Michelle Dockery). He negotiates a plea deal, and the two board a charter plane flown by a folksy pilot (Wahlberg) who, it’s soon revealed, is not who he says he is. That’s a movie! Three characters, one location, high stakes, beautiful stock footage of Alaskan mountain scenery. There’s nothing more to it, which is fine. Grace, Dockery, and Wahlberg play their characters as familiar archetypes: the badass lawwoman, the vicious bad guy, the nebbishy secondary villain who turns comrade due to dangerous circumstances. The setting includes built-in tension – what if they crash into a mountain?!? – and the arc of the plot is decidedly uncomplicated and unsurprising.
It also feels very inexpensive, which is not a dig unless you’re expecting fabulously detailed footage of airplanes in midair and not cutaways that border on Microsoft Flight Simulator graphics. The cheapo effects are mostly charming, aside from a suspiciously Midjourney-flavored opening shot of a motel that lasts all but two seconds. Most of the movie is close-ups of frightened people inside a tiny plane, so there’s not a ton of opportunity for anything fancy. Gibson pulls out the big guns for the finale, which involves a fighter jet and an army of ambulances.
It’s honestly quite funny to see this after months of promotional material hyping up the fact that Flight Risk is directed by the guy who made Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ, and Apocalypto – three of the most visually arresting epics ever filmed – but it’s nice to know he’s good on a budget, too. Gibson has been making a comeback for about 15 years or so, most recently in shoot-em-up thrillers with titles like Agent Game, Hot Seat, and Desperation Road, and while I won’t defend his past patterns of behavior offscreen, it’s cool to see what he can achieve with three actors and a pressure-cooker setting. His experience as both a veteran director and the kind of actor you call when you need a villain in a movie about cartels or secret agents no doubt helped him turn Flight Risk from a mid write-off to a surprisingly good thriller. You do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to him, but he’s made an entertaining movie.
The script, which was written by Jared Rosenberg and made The Black List’s survey of best unproduced screenplays in 2020, is, again, about what you’d expect. The dialogue isn’t going to win any poetry awards. It’s peppered with a near-constant string of jokes about gay sex and soiling oneself, apparently the two most humiliating things that could happen to a man in Flight Risk’s universe. Dockery doesn’t get a lot to do, saddled as she is with the “girl who punches and says ‘Shut up’ all the time” role, but she’s very good at looking very, very worried for 90 minutes. Grace is funny without tipping over into irritating, obviously enjoying playing the “scared weenie” bit. Wahlberg in particular verges on cartoonish, repeating scary bad guy lines like “I’m gonna enjoy this” over and over as if reciting a mantra. Also, what they do with his hair – or lack thereof – must be seen to be believed. The trailers don’t do it justice.
Is Flight Risk the apex of cinema? No. Is it dumb fun? For the most part, yes. You could do worse than a movie about being trapped inside a tiny airplane with a killer, and whether it’s due to the capabilities of its director or the simplicity of its concept, Flight Risk sticks the landing.
