FLIGHT RISK - Mark Reviews Movies

Flight Risk, Lionsgate

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | January 24, 2025

A thriller doesn't need to make too much sense to function, and with that philosophy in mind, Flight Risk barely functions as a thriller. Its plot is so simple that it can be summed up in a single sentence. On a flight over Alaska in a single-engine airplane, a fugitive who has turned state's evidence is targeted by a hit man, disguised as the plane's pilot, and must be protected by the U.S. marshal in charge of taking the witness into custody. Okay, it is, admittedly, a lengthy and inherently convoluted sentence, but first-time screenwriter Jared Rosenberg's premise is one that holds some promise.

It also possesses some built-in challenges. For one thing, most of the story takes place inside the cramped compartment of that plane, meaning there is literally very little room for any action. Director Mel Gibson generally knows how to stage action, but in returning behind the camera for the first time in almost a decade, he seems to have forgotten the job.

The movie looks cheap from its opening scene, which appears and plays as if it was filmed at the last second to stretch the brief run time and/or clear up the story's setup (There's an exterior shot of a motel that looks to have been made with computer graphics from two decades ago). Once the key players are on the plane, it should look better. The set is minimal and real, after all, but nobody seems to have considered the logistics of how to present a standoff between three people inside a tiny space.

It's never clear, for example, what characters can hear with the whir of the engine and the whooshing of arctic winds outside the plane. Sometimes, the marshal, named Madolyn (Michelle Dockery), can hear her detainee, a mafia accountant named Winston (Topher Grace) whom she finds in hiding in that motel, without any issue. When the script requires it, though, Winston might as well have his mouth taped shut, such as when he discovers that the plane's pilot Daryl (Mark Wahlberg) isn't the man he claims to be.

We can accept some of this, except, perhaps, later in the movie, after the threat Daryl poses has been momentarily thwarted. Up front, Madolyn and Winston can hear him singing a song to try to irritate them, but they somehow miss the professional assassin throwing a knife into the air and loudly cursing when the blade crashes to the floor of the plane. These are possibly nitpicks, to be sure, but then again, it's not as Rosenberg, Gibson, and the cast give us much else to concentrate on as the plot comes to a halt.

There are two major threats in this story. The first, of course, is the killer, hired to take out Winston before he can show up to court and testify against the mob boss. Daryl is the sort of villain who'd twirl a mustache if he had one, but that old cliché of a character was probably never as obsessed with rape as this guy is. At a certain point, all of the character's dialogue becomes a string of overt rape threats or innuendo of the same topic. Sure, the villain is meant to be evil, but even a little variety or nuance goes a long way with such a character. Once we catch on to the guy's gimmick, we might be more distracted by how little effort went into covering up the stubble on Wahlberg's mostly bald head.

Our heroes aren't much more interesting, either. Grace jokes his way through his role, whether he's trying to convince Madolyn to cut him some slack or fearing that he's about to die in a terrifying plane crash. Dockery at least shows some command and confidence as the marshal, but by the time Madolyn has a lengthy monologue about her disastrous last attempt to keep a witness alive, the character has run her course and circled it several times over.

The second threat is the act of flying the plane. Daryl's the only one who knows how, leaving Madolyn to pull the plane out of a freefall (that would probably result in catastrophe, since the movie really wants to milk its few scenes of suspense) and throw the thing on autopilot. In apparent solidarity, the screenplay goes into the same mode around that point, with Daryl threatening, Winston joking, and Madolyn trying to uncover a conspiracy via phone calls.

Flight Risk is repetitive and dull. That's only in part because of the limited setting, however. Most of it comes down to the simple fact that the filmmakers lack any imagination to do anything with that setting.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products