When it comes to scope, the directorial career of Mel Gibson has been pretty damn huge. There’s the multiple battles fought by William Wallace in Braveheart of course, not to mention the thrilling jungle antics of Apocalypto or the hellish war of Hacksaw Ridge – and who can forget Gibson’s most infamous cinematic outing as he detailed the last days of Jesus himself in the savagely brutal The Passion Of The Christ.
Well, it’s been a little over eight years since the controversial figure stepped behind the camera, but with the thriller, Flight Risk, Gibbo’s scale has been pushed way back as he’s delivered one of those tense films that confines itself to a single location like Phone Booth, Buried or Rear Window. This time, the action is located within a rickety old plane rattling its way across Alaska with three passengers, but even with Mark Wahlberg on board, putting in his first psycho role since 1996’s Fear, can Gibson maintain the tension required to last the whole journey?
After arresting weasely accountant, Winston, in the middle of Alaska in an aborted attempt to live off the grid, U.S. Marshal Madolyn Harris finds that he unsurprisingly wants to cut a deal on his employers, the Moretti crime family. As he requests full immunity, full protection and all the trimmings that come with it, Madolyn makes the arrangements to fly him back to Anchorage to make a transfer New York to get him to testify, but the only plane she can charter in such short notice is a small rust bucket piloted by gum chewing Texan, Daryl Booth who seems chatty enough.
However when they’re up in the air, suspicions start to fly higher than the plane itself when certain inconsistencies about their garrulous flyboy refuse to add up and sure enough these tiny little clues reveal the fact that “Daryl” isn’t exactly who he claims to be.
No, not only is “Daryl” not Daryl, but he’s also a ranting psychopath for hire who has been tasked by the Moretti family to fly both Madolyn and Winston to some remote location and do all manner of messed up things to them before putting them out of everyone’s misery. However, in the ensuing struggle, Madolyn manages to get the best of the maniac and takes him out of action by zapping into oblivion with a taser and then zip tying him in the back of the plane – but this leads to a whole other issue that could be more fatal than sharing a cockpit with a raving maniac: neither Madolyn or Winston has the first clue about how to fly a plane.
Worse yet, the trust levels between U S. Marshal and her informant aren’t exactly what you’d call healthy and she figures out that a mole for the Moretti’s must be lurking with her department. With trust in horribly short supply, Madolyn has to babysit a vital witness and learn how to fly a plane while simultaneously keeping an eye on the utter lunatic lurking in the back.
While the famous trials and tribulations of Mel Gibson have stopped him moving in the circles he once enjoyed, it’s still initially kinda weird that he’s decided to tackle such a restrained, confined project for his sixth directorial venture, but once you get into the real meat and gristle of Flight Risk, the reasoning of it starts to make a kind of perverse sense. You see, not to get too conspiratorial about things, but Mel still hopes to get his sequel to The Passion Of The Christ off the ground but hasn’t directed a feature since 2016’s Hacksaw Ridge so the best way to shake off any rust would be to tackle a forgettable thriller with minimal sets and cast just to get back up to speed before heralding the cinematic second coming of Christ.
Taken on the level that an Oscar winning director is pulling something of a hack job in order to get back in the saddle before ploughing into a larger project, Flight Risk isn’t actually that bad. While you’re actually perched in the passenger seat, it proves to be something of a harmless triple-hander that throws up a bunch of entertaining, familiar, aerial roadblocks for our protagonists to wade through before the refreshingly short runtime starts spinning those end credits. In fact, it recalls John Woo’s work on the 2023 festive thriller Silent Night, which also felt like an intensive film school for a veteran director wanting to exercise the atrophy out of their filmmaking muscles by adding restrictions to the storytelling by either having a mute hero, or in Flight Risk’s case, setting the thing on a small plane. However, there’s the sneaking feeling that if the film didn’t have Gibson and Wahlberg involved, there’s a damn good chance it would be one of those fairly nondescript titles you’d constantly scroll past on a Netflix selection screen.
Still, it does genuinely seem like everyone – particularly Gibson and Wahlberg – aren’t looking to reinvent the wheel, but instead are dead set in having as much fun as they can. Wahlberg, saddled with a truly distracting bout of male pattern baldness that proves to somehow be the most memorable twist in the film, is having a fucking ball playing a complete and total psycho as he chews up whole sections of scenery and spits them back out in the form of vague, sexual threats aimed at a truly horrified looking Topher Grace. However, it’s fairly amusing that the actor is all over the posters when a) he’s actually the villain, b) it doesn’t reveal that he’s bald and c) he spends around 65% of the movie actually unconscious while handcuffed to various things as the heroes struggle to work out the basics of this whole flying a plane thing.
Given a rather thankless straight role of the constantly stern Marshal is Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery who doesn’t get the benefit of wildly overacting like Wahlberg or mouthing dry asides like Grace and instead actually has to move virtually the entire plot herself, juggling a traumatic backstory and figuring out who from her office she can trust with tryingvto fly a plane and engaging in the occasional fist fight with Marky Mark. However, she manages to admirably keep her American accent as level as the plane and proves to be a solid lead as she tries to establish trust with Topher Grace’s informant who is required to literally do nothing more than be a broken human jukebox whose entire shtick is to deliver an endless stream of sarcastic comments and wisecracks.
Yes, it’s all pretty standard and not even Gibson can stretch the material without a few tears here abd there, but on the other hand, Flight Risk seems to know exactly what it is and as a result, is actually pretty funny at times. Be it the unfeasibly chirpy Indian voice over the radio that helps Madolyn take a crash course in flying or an absolutely bizarre finalé, the director seems way more invested in delivering chucklesome moments than striving to keep the tension levels up to David Fincher levels, but while it fills an hour and a half rather painlessly, expect Flight Risk to plot a course in one ear and straight out the other the second it touches down on tarmac.
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