Review: ‘Flight Risk’ is an ‘absolute suck’ situation, but there’s one way to circumvent that

A fair chunk of moviegoers harbor a certain fussiness about realism that I could never bring myself to understand. These folk, regardless of what kind of film they thrust themselves into, will be so dedicated to spotting plot holes and despising the acting, that they’ll forget to well and truly watch the movie.

This obsession with realism, I presume, dissipates rather quickly when you’ve established even a vague proximity to the film world like I have. The reason being that you become painfully aware that fully grown, allegedly professional adults allow films like Flight Risk to get made the way they do. Once you passively comprehend this, there is absolutely nothing on this godless green Earth that could register for you as “unrealistic” anymore, because anything is possible at that point.

Flight Risk stars Michelle Dockery as Madelyn Harris, a Deputy U.S. Marshal who’s tasked with escorting a man named Winston (Topher Grace) from Alaska to New York so that he can testify against the Moretti crime family. They board a non-descript plane flown by pilot Darryl Booth (Mark Wahlberg), but when the pilot turns out to be a hitman sent to kill Winston, the journey begins to unravel quite perilously.

The goal of making this film even halfway bearable is to regard it as a parody because none of Flight Risk‘s moving parts give the impression that this was an honest attempt at an action thriller, or even a crude action comedy, as it more often behaves. In its sea of meaningless intrigue (more on that later), the greatest mystery of Flight Risk is what exactly drew Mel Gibson of all people to the director’s chair.

It’s no easy nor responsible task to separate Gibson from his infamous past, but speaking purely from a filmmaking perspective, Gibson has firmly established himself as a serious storyteller. It’s hard to deny the prowess of the grit, scope, and drama of Braveheart, Apocalypto, and Hacksaw Ridge, and even his lesser directorial outings at least had a sheen of robust effort. But in Flight Risk, the film opens to a neon motel sign with the letters “O” and “T” shorted out (thereby spelling “Mel” in giant letters), as if to purposely telegraph how idiotic the next 90 minutes are going to be. Indeed, Gibson directing thoroughly non-Gibson-coded material is the film’s greatest joke, as well as the crux of its accidental parody.

But back to the point of 90 idiotic minutes, Gibson and company deliver on that front. Topher Grace is up a creek with no paddle as Winston, the meek fish-out-of-water who’s ostensibly meant to be the comic relief, as though awkwardly announcing that you peed your pants — and other gags like it — is worth the price of a movie ticket. This would be indefensible just on its own, but Grace can’t even manifest an impression of comedic timing here; a likely casualty of the creative discord that Flight Risk reeks of.

Dockery is no better as Madelyn, who finds herself at the center of a couple of predicaments, including keeping the hitman incapacitated, contending with the corruption back home in the justice department, landing the plane, flirting with a pilot named Hassan who’s going to help her land said plane, and keeping Winston alive.

If this sounds like too many plot threads to tie up in 90 minutes, it’s because it is. Most of these beats only exist to give the illusion that something is happening in this movie, and even then, Flight Risk doesn’t seem to know which ones — if any — are even worth pretending to invest in. As a result, Dockery has no real way to approach Harris sincerely, because the character’s personal drama has no narrative relevance, and exists entirely to fill the gaps between the action. And that’s if the film decides to go there instead of pivoting to more nervous stammering from Winston.

None of these things — Harris’ past and the police corruption, Winston’s panicky demeanor and guilt, and the violent clashes with the pilot — boast any meaningful cohesion. It’s as though Flight Risk thought it could coast by on the presence of Wahlberg’s killer pilot alone, only to realize that he would need to spend half of the movie handcuffed to the wall to make a feature-length runtime work, thereby neutering the danger/tension and requiring the film to gerrymander a rickety story about trust in its place. It grasps at straws and we viewers choke on its negligence.

Finally, there’s the matter of Wahlberg, who bookends Flight Risk‘s unintentional parody chops. Let’s face it; regardless of the prowess he’s shown in likes of Boogie Nights, The Departed, The Fighter, and others, it can be difficult not to impulsively confine Wahlberg to a colorful-tongued, half-delinquent archetype who lives and dies by the twang of his New England accent.

Here, he comes at us with a pronounced Southern drawl while the reveal of his true identity simmers underneath the character’s opening moments. No sooner does he drop the mask, however, do we find out that the Kentucky spice in his voice is also as fake as his toupee. And in its place? You guessed it; that ever-definitive Bostonian inflection. The fourth towel has been thrown into the ring, except this one matches the wink-adjacent energy of having Gibson in the driver’s seat of such a frail story.

From then on, Wahlberg descends into a truly perverted state of jester’s privilege, rhyming off vulgarity after misogynistic vulgarity and existing for no other purpose than to irritate and stab Winston and Madelyn. He’s easy to cheer against, but that doesn’t mean much when Flight Risk harbors a near-sadistic neglect for its characters. Indeed, Wahlberg’s hitman barely qualifies as an antagonist here given the artificiality of the would-be protagonists. Similar sentiments could be applied to Flight Risk across the board.

I’m choosing to believe that Jared Rosenberg’s original script (voted onto the 2020 Black List along with the Oscar-nominated screenplay of May December) was completely and utterly hacked to pieces at various stages of the production line. The disjointed emptiness of Flight Risk‘s proceedings certainly read as shadows of a different story (even three different stories) and the sheer lack of enthusiasm that ricochets between the three actors and Gibson is nauseatingly contagious, and could itself be the result of having signed up for one thing, and then working on a much worse thing.

But regardless of how Flight Risk started out, we can only judge the version that arrived in theaters, and that version is the foulest sort of foul that we’ll see all year. And even if you take the wisest possible route and canonize Flight Risk as a parody in your head alone, the fact that you need to do that in the first place says everything about this horrid state of affairs.