“I’m going to enjoy this,” is a phrase repeated by Mark Wahlberg’s balding hitman Daryl Booth several times throughout Flight Risk’s climactic action sequences. While that might be true for Wahlberg, clearly having a ball in this role, it’s not a sentiment that rings particularly true for the audiences strapped in for Mel Gibson’s rote and uninspired aviation actioner.
At a brisk 91 minutes, Flight Risk is quick to set the gears in motion: Winston (Topher Grace) is a fugitive being escorted cross-country by U.S Marshal Madelyn Harris (Michelle Dockery) to testify in court against the mob boss he was corroborating with. The catch? A hitman (Wahlberg) has assumed the identity of their pilot Daryl Booth and has been tasked with killing Winston before the plane ever lands in New York.
Gibson is working on a much smaller scale here than his last few endeavours (Hacksaw Ridge, Apocalypto) – while the politics of why that is the case may be obvious, it’s an interesting conceit for a filmmaker with several iconic films under their belt. What ensues is a chamber piece 5,000 feet in the air as these characters try to untangle the various alliances that led to the endangering of their lives. Questions like ‘Who is the mole?’ and ‘Who is the hitman?’ are economically stretched throughout the tight runtime and the script always finds a way to keep the one-location interesting; it’s a testament to Jared Rosenberg’s writing that Flight Risk is anything but boring or slow.
But for a film like this to work, the dialogue and the characterisation need to be involving and nuanced and this script is not. The characters are thinly sketched and the mind games are lacking in tension or ingenuity – Flight Risk feels like a lesser reskin of a model not only done to death but done to better results in the past. The cast is game and it’s amusing to watch Wahlberg with a bald head and spurt pantomime villain nonsense at his prisoners. But the direction is bland and with a script that doesn’t offer much, Flight Risk is perhaps not the successful takeoff Mel Gibson was looking for. It’s a pretty disastrous crash landing.
Flight Risk is now playing in cinemas.
Flight Risk
Summary
While it is never boring or slow, Flight Risk is very bland and lacks tension and ingenuity.
