'Flight Risk' Review

Mel Gibson's new thriller goes dark.

*Content warning: Flight Risk contains bloody violence, copious foul language, and exceptionally dark subject matter and sexual threats (more on that later). Not recommended for kids and teens, or for adults sensitive to such elements.*

Mel Gibson has directed another film, and for many cinephiles that fact alone demands attention. Love him or hate him, the man has an undeniable talent for telling a compelling story and putting stunning visuals on our movie screens. Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto, and Hacksaw Ridge are all excellent films which struggle with good and evil, virtue and vice, beauty and ugliness. Mel’s outspoken Catholicism (albeit with a sedevacantist streak) may also cause his films to be of interest to our readers, especially those (like me) who have a sneaking suspicion that Flight Risk is helping Mel to raise funds for his long-rumored Resurrection movie. The presence of another prominent Catholic actor and frequent Gibson co-star, Mark Wahlberg, only heightened my curiosity as I entered the theater.

Flight Risk is a thriller centered around US Marshall Madolyn Harris (Michelle Dockery) who is tasked with bringing a fugitive-turned-cooperating witness Winston (Topher Grace) to a trial in New York City from his hiding spot off the grid in Alaska. She charters a small prop plane to fly them to Anchorage, but its pilot (Wahlberg) is not who he seems. In fact, he is a sadistic hitman sent by Winston’s mobster boss to ensure that Winston never makes it to the trial. This setup alone is quite enough to make a tight thriller, and for the most part it delivers on the promise of the premise. It is punchy, the tension rachets up well as the runtime goes on, and the small plane with only three characters is appropriately claustrophobic for most of the runtime. Gibson even allows us to breathe when necessary by pulling out for exterior shots of the gorgeous Alaskan wilderness. It is competently made and at a clean 90 minutes does not overstay its welcome.

You may sense that I am damning the film with faint praise, but before I criticize Flight Risk I do want to emphasize that I do not think this is a bad film by any means. It is a perfectly entertaining entry in its genre, and fans of this sort of film (especially the 80s and 90s films from which it draws inspiration) will likely enjoy it. However, there were two aspects of the film which made it quite disappointing for me: first, its unnecessarily dark subject matter, and second, that it bears little resemblence to Mel Gibson’s other movies. For these two reasons, I find it hard to recommend Flight Risk to a general audience beyond those who are diehard thriller fans (or who wish to fund Mel’s future projects).

First, the darkness. I believe that this premise is very strong: the only person who can fly the plane is a hitman actively trying to kill the other two. This premise has endless opportunities for drama and for tense situations, and a mob hitman is a perfectly scary antagonist for such a film. But Flight Risk takes Mark Wahlberg’s character (who never reveals his name) a few steps further. Instead of merely being a contract killer, Wahlberg is a thoroughly deranged pervert, threatening to rape and torture both Madolyn and Winston (and Winston’s mom). He’s such a sicko that he’s not even getting paid to do this job, just for the pleasure it gives him. He is constantly hurling out vicious sexual threats and vulgar jokes, and I can only hear Mark Wahlberg fantasize about raping his fellow passengers so many times before I became disgusted not just at his character but at the movie itself. I felt that this aspect of the character was completely unnecessary and gives a repulsive undertone to an otherwise entertaining film.

Second, I thought this was a real step down in quality compared to Mel Gibson’s other directed films. His other films are all sweeping, epic stories, either set in war or the ultimate battle between Christ and Satan. Gibson has an excellent eye for grand scale, epic conflict, and high stakes. Flight Risk has none of that. Granted, its genre is completely different from the other films, and I do not want to box Gibson into only one type of film. If he wanted to stretch his filmmaking muscles, I’m all for it. However, he never really feels comfortable with this small scale in Flight Risk, often defaulting to basic compositions and failing to creatively use his limitations. There are, to be sure, flashes of the brilliance that is evident in his other films, but my suspicion grows that Flight Risk was only a means to raise money for Resurrection and perhaps secure a distribution partner in Lionsgate, rather than a project from an auteur director passionate to tell this story. Gibson has become somewhat of a gun-for-hire actor since his ostracization from Hollywood post-Passion, starring in many low-budget and direct to video action films. I do not fault him for this; indeed, I often find such films immensely entertaining. However, this seems like Gibson’s first gun-for-hire job as a director, and as a fan of his earlier work it saddens me to see him reduced to such a position. Hopefully it is worth it and his Resurrection film will be a beautiful masterpiece; only time will tell.

Overall, I cannot recommend Flight Risk. The entertaining elements of the film are outweighed by the unnecessary repulsiveness of its antagonist. I sincerely hope to see Mel Gibson return to form in whatever his next project is; we need filmmakers of his caliber to counter the bloated franchise fastfood and the twee indie fare that has been haunting our movie theaters for too long now. Hopefully he gets the chance to direct truly epic stories again in the near future, and hopefully he can restrain what he called his “pornographic brain” recently on the Joe Rogan Podcast. His films, and the American film industry at large, will be better for it.