Crash and Burn
How such a dumpster fire can be so consistently watchable is a true mystery for the ages.
Flight Risk
Director: Mel Gibson • Writer: Jared Rosenberg
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Dockery, Topher Grace
USA • 1hr 31mins
Opens Hong Kong Mar 20 • IIB
Grade: C-
In Mel Gibson’s Flight Risk, disgraced – and traumatised – US Marshal Madolyn Harris (Downton Abbey’s Lady Mary, Michelle Dockery) re-captures a mob accountant-turned-snitch, Winston (Topher Grace ), after he decides running is a better idea than testifying. Harris finds him in deepest darkest Alaska, and hires a cheap-ass twin prop plane to get them both to Anchorage so they can get back to New York for trial. While they wait on a landing strip someplace, Texan pilot Daryl Booth (Mark Wahlberg) eventually hops on the plane and gets them on the road. Or in the air. It takes about two minutes to realise Daryl is shady AF, confirmed when Winston sees the hidden pilot’s permit that identifies Daryl a Black man. After a kerfuffle that reveals the hired hitter is bald and knocks him on his ass, Harris gets on the crackling radio looking for help, ignoring the satellite phone in her pocket, and finally calls her boss Van Sant (Leah Rimini in voice only) to relay the emergency. They’re with a killer, they’re lost and they have no pilot.
So many questions. Why is the US Marshal service hiring rickety charters? Do people regularly get on airplanes that don’t have pilots or crew, like they’re minibuses at the terminal? Do Marshals that forget they have gear like sat phones often keep their jobs? Does Winston ever shut up? Does Daryl need to be bald? Who the fuck is he supposed to be?
The high concept of Flight Risk is a good one, and is the foundation for the kind of schlocky, brisk actioners that used to go straight-to-video back in the day. Now it’s the kind of lean, muscular thriller that’s pre-sold to a million territories and streamers and makes back its modest budget before even going into production – and often stars Gerard Butler. But those films always coast on a singularly charming/hilarious/freaky villain, without which they fall apart. As Wahlberg befuddlingly plays “Daryl”, he’s a gum-chomping psychotic, sexually fluid rapist and maybe cannibal who’s done time in prison and who doesn’t murder people for money? He does it for shits and giggles? Writer Jared Rosenberg has put absolutely zero thought into the character to make us fear, loathe, understand, pity or feel anything about him beyond confusion. And this was a Black List script – one of 2020’s best unproduced screenplays. Da fuq?
And yet… Flight Risk is a confoundingly watchable dumpster fire. On some lizard brain level it sucks you in and you’ll want to know what comes next, even if you’ll see the back of your head your eyes will roll so hard, it’s often offensive, it makes little sense – Harris’s trauma involves a prisoner who died because she shackled her to an immovable object so of course she does the same thing to Winston and my god woman! – and it frustratingly relies on too many characters we never see. And one we finally do see is played by two actors (Maaz Ali and Monib Abhat as guide pilot Hasan). Huh? Look, I know: Steven Knight’s Locke also stars actors we never see. Trust me when I say this is not that.
Regardless of what you think of Gibson personally (and we try to keep it strictly about the work here, but admittedly that’s hard sometimes) he’s a competent director, with a solid grasp on action beats and how to really grind out the tension in a thriller, and he has a pious kindred spirit in Wahlberg and his gawdawful skull cap – which he claims is not a skull cap. Flight Risk is one of those movies where you just sit there, slack-jawed, wondering how it all went so wrong when it should have been an easy thing to get stupidly right. Man, Butler can do this in his sleep.