Mel Gibson’s latest movie as a director might’ve intended to be an airborne counterpart to Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, but it’s a weirdly tension-free B movie, writes Luke Buckmaster.
Flight Risk
Flight Risk is a title that sounds rather like a Gerard Butler movie, don’t you think? Turns out it’s a Mark Wahlberg movie—a step up, perhaps, in the sense Marky Mark’s oeuvre is more eclectic and a tad more respected, stretching from the gutters of B moviedom to Oscar-minted fare. Like Butler he has the vibes of a strong man, a man’s man, a cold-hard carnivore. These blokes know their way around a tool shed.
Warlhberg is the main attraction in the first film for almost a decade to be directed by Mel Gibson: a human-shaped counterargument to the very idea of cancel culture (this guy’s career has kept rolling forward despite all those horrific controversies occuring during his downtime). As an artist, Gibson’s work behind the camera carries a mighty sting. I’m no fan of The Passion of the Christ, but by god it’s bold. As is Hacksaw Ridge: a brutally visceral and immersive war movie. But the magnum opus of Gibson’s filmmaking career is his 2006 Aztec-themed end-of-era epic Apocalypto: an astonishing work of art that feels like a portal to ancient times. It’s the kind of film sometimes described as “pure cinema”—a label inferring great motion and visuality.
It’s bizarre that the same director was behind the control wheel of Flight Risk, one of those annoying productions that’s both preposterous and boring. If you’re going to be the former, you cannot be the latter. It feels more cut-rate than the rest of his work, partly because it mostly takes place in a single setting: a small aeroplane flying across Alaskan wilderness, transporting three passengers. Although I didn’t really believe this was an actual plane, or that the skies were anything but virtual, or even that the characters were in danger. More on that in a moment.
The key cargo is Winston (Topher Grace), a weasley mafia accountant who makes a deal to squeal on his (mob) boss, putting a great big target on his back. U.S. Marshal Madelyn Harris (Michelle Dockery) is in charge of transporting him to the nearest city, where he can testify. Wahlberg plays the Texan pilot, Daryl Booth, who boards the plane, all chirpy and personable, chewing gum and making small talk, Wahlberg doing his everyman thing (which he’s very good at). You can sense the film is building towards a dramatic reveal; that Everything Is Not What It Means.
I’m being cagey with the details, suffice to say that the passengers find themselves in a spot of bother, experiencing escalating danger that’s of course connected to Winston’s journey. The weirdest thing about the film is also its greatest failure: nothing feels intense or foreboding, even when its characters are in the direst of straits. There were times when I felt like grabbing them by the scruffs of their neck and yelling: “DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND THE SITUATION YOU’RE IN? WHY ARE YOU SO CALM?”
Gibson’s visual approach, so striking in his previous work, here lacks flavour and menace. Flight Risk‘s colour palette is light and innocuous, and the frame feels rather airy despite a spatially contained central setting (which should have felt claustrophobic). Setup-wise it’s a mid-air chamber piece, pushing the performers front and centre, though they don’t carry much weight (and the script’s bland dialogue doesn’t help). Without giving too much away, Wahlberg is sidelined for a considerable chunk of the runtime, while Michelle Dockery brings almost no gravitas; I found her entirely unconvincing as a US Marshal.
Gibson was obviously shooting for white knuckle intensity and tightly wound drama, the plane a stagey vessel floating precariously between life and death—the film intended perhaps as an airborne counterpart to Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. To say it falls well short of the mark, or the Marky Marky, is something of an understatement.
