It’s more than a little odd when a director’s follow-up film to an Oscar-nominated hit is being offloaded onto theaters in the frozen tundra that is “dumpuary.” It’s weirder, still, when press materials make an effort to essentially erase the filmmaker’s name from the work entirely. It also isn’t every day that said filmmaker is Mel Gibson, a figure for which the word “controversial” does little to encapsulate his wild career and personal life.
So even if Lionsgate is coyly selling Flight Risk as “from the award-winning director of Braveheart, Apocalypto, and Hacksaw Ridge” without telling you who that award-winning director is, it doesn’t really matter. In fact, this anonymizing might turn out to be a good thing for Gibson. Flight Risk is a steep step downwards for the Oscar-winning director: a gritty, shiftless little B-picture set almost entirely on a Cessna flying over Alaska that combines bad CGI with even worse writing.
Yet the set-up is nevertheless full of possibility. US Marshall Madelyn (Michelle Dockery) is forced to transport mob informant Winston (Topher Grace) from his rural hideaway to Anchorage, before getting him to New York to testify. Chartering a small plane piloted by Mark Wahlberg’s “Daryl Booth,” it becomes obvious that Booth isn’t who he says he is, and is instead hell-bent on killing both Madelyn and Winson but not before torturing them first, thus kickstarting a series of rotating set pieces aboard the tiny plane as power shifts between these three characters on their trip.
So far, so good. But the script by Jared Rosenberg seems to have run out of ideas after its logline, thinly sketching out the three characters and unable to come up with anything more compelling than: Madelyn figures out that Booth is a hitman; she gets the better of him and ties him up; he escapes and attacks her. This repeats across a 90-minute runtime.
Gibson has been steadily working in direct-to-video action movies for the better part of the decade. With titles like Boneyard, Desperation Road, and Confidential Informant, he’s been part of a consistent diet of mid-tier, anonymous films that populate Tubi. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with them, he seems to have turned that ethos onto his directing career.
For whatever can be said about Gibson the person––and a lot can be said––he has always been a visceral, nearly dogmatic filmmaker. I may have found Passion of the Christ and, to a lesser extent, Hacksaw Ridge overzealous portraits of faith, but they still represented an idiosyncratic director willing to bet on the artistic and commercial value of his beliefs. These works also portended the mainstreaming of Christian filmmaking, something an outfit like Angel Studios has monetized to successful results.
This is all to say it’s quite weird for Gibson’s name to pop up as the director of Flight Risk. The film is being sold as a down-and-dirty genre picture, a return to the lean popcorn escapism of the ‘90s. Unfortunately it’s never as violent, crass, or knowingly dumb as those films; somewhere along the way Gibson turned on the film’s autopilot, forgetting the propulsive action that made something like Apocalypto a hyper-violent critical and commercial success.
We have, too, a trio of performances from Dockery, Grace, and Wahlberg that are so ill-attuned to the material as to essentially leave them acting in completely different genres altogether. Dockery plays the entire thing straight, lending a stoicism that feels like vinegar to Grace’s oily, smarmy douchiness––a mode the actor’s nearly perfected at this point.
If Gibson’s been populating the $5 DVD bin recently, Wahlberg’s filled his coffers with outsized Netflix cash for entire films that seem like they’re AI-generated. Him playing the heavy here––a twisted, balding, psychopath intent on not just murdering Dockery and Grace’s characters, but having fun while doing so––sounds good on paper. But the performance is so dialed-up that it comes across as a cartoon when his character doesn’t disappear for long stretches of runtime, lying unconscious in the back of the plane.
Rather than prove unwatchable––though I would argue its CGI is––Flight Risk is never as fun as it should be. Gibson’s main draw as a filmmaker has often been an orgiastic focus on violence that sometimes felt at odds with the material he was presenting. The thought of him adopting that aesthetic to something quote-unquote lowbrow is enticing on paper; too bad Flight Risk is never as campy as it should be.
Flight Risk is now in wide release.