Flight Risk Never Gets Off The Ground

I feel torn about Flight Risk and the discourse surrounding it in some ways, because I know that many of the reviewers panning it are the type to criticize the occasionally antisemitic Mel Gibson in the morning before going to a Free Palestine rally that very same night. Nevertheless, I'm not here to lecture you on racism or Middle Eastern geopolitics, and however the cookie of international affairs may crumble, the unfortunate constant is that Flight Risk is just not very good, regardless of whether its detractors understand how fighting a war works or not. It is a perfect example of a director trying something new when he should have stayed in his lane. This circus of campiness could not possibly be further removed from The Passion of the Christ or even Hacksaw Ridge, two of Gibson's earlier and more serious efforts, and even if some of it is worth a momentary chuckle, the unserious corniness of this movie and its characters overwhelms any and all amusement. Oh, and did I mention that you're stuck on a tiny airplane with these people for the entire movie?

You'd think that a pilot without a name would raise at least a few yellow flags for anyone trying to transport a high-value prisoner, but maybe I'm being unfair to U.S. Marshal Madolyn Harris, though neither she nor informant-slash-prisoner Winston seems like the brightest star in the sky. Soon enough, Madolyn's going to have to contend with a lot more than a surprisingly docile prisoner when it's revealed that her pilot (Mark Wahlberg) is a grotesquely balding, gleefully homicidal maniac with a ridiculous tolerance for physical pain. When I first saw the trailer for Flight Risk in theaters, I was genuinely intrigued by the idea of Gibson trying something new, mainly because Wahlberg looked absolutely unrecognizable. I will say, the man absolutely kills his role. Even if the promotional material gave away the twist, his unnamed and probably bipolar pilot character is still loads of fun, like a serial killer with a horrible barber and a fondness for the Tea Party Movement.

However, despite some of the more amusing elements of Flight Risk, it doesn't take long for the gas tank of good things to say about it to hit "E." This movie starts to run out of steam about halfway through, because once all the beans have been spilled, it's like it doesn't know what to do with itself, and the plane cockpit is small; there's only so much it can do outside of opening the floor to its characters so that they can trade barbs with each other. I'll give it to you straight: this movie is annoying. Watching it is like listening to your kids fight in the back seat of a car. It's campy, occasionally juvenile, and would have benefited from one or two more rewrites, another couple of months in production limbo, or maybe the threat of the car - or plane - being turned around.

The movie's visual effects don't help its case. The very first thing you'll see in it is an ugly and hopelessly fake digital rendering of a rural Alaskan motel, complete with a really bad CGI moose. In fact, the entire movie has a weird habit of digitally crafting landscapes that the crew could have just as easily shot in real life, and crafting them poorly at that. It made me wonder why the filmmakers put so little effort into this movie; the answer could be as simple and as infuriating as Gibson needing funding for Passion of the Christ 2. The cinematography itself isn't bad, at least when what we're seeing is real and not a moose that looks like it walked off the set of a bad Christmas home video, though there are a couple of noticeable continuity errors sprinkled throughout a movie that reeks of necessity.

The dialogue of Flight Risk is simply unpleasant, a collection of forty-five-year-old cliches sitting somewhere between a sitcom and an action movie. Its unserious corniness can get very annoying very quickly, even if some of it is well worth a momentary chuckle. It almost feels as though Gibson is adapting a really old screenplay that sat in production hell for Lord knows how long, and when you supplement that with an all-too-predictable needle drop of New Order's Blue Monday, things go from bad to worse to unintentionally comical. The load of camp in this movie would make a parody YouTuber blush. It is a collection of everything that didn't work about movies from the 80s, an assembly line of cliches that seems to be testing how much your tolerance for platitudes can take; I can only take so much.

I can commend Mel Gibson for trying something new with Flight Risk, but between some sketchy technical elements, an unbelievably large serving of irritating tropes, and a lack of sufficient ideas, this movie never really gets off the ground. I'll admit that Mark Wahlberg's transformation hooked me, and on that front, this movie does the hard work to make a big-name actor look truly unrecognizable in their role. However, Wahlberg isn't enough to save this underplotted and oversilly dud. Gibson should stick to serious dramas. I'll take Christ's resurrection over old cinema cliches any day.

Gibson is a director who's known for his ambition. And so, it is unfortunate and even downright baffling that Flight Risk so curiously and detrimentally lacks a backbone.

Flight Risk - 4/10

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