Flight Risk

Grade: C-

Flight Risk’s tagline is “Y’all need a pilot?” It does. There’s a lack of direction from director Mel Gibson. It’s pretty much a three-hander, and most of it takes place on a plane. Nobody is on the same plane, artistically, though. Mark Wahlberg hams it up with some questionable male pattern baldness. Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey) gives the most sincere performance. Topher Grace, from That ‘70s Show, is the so-called comic relief, rattling off forced unfunny one-liners like he’s still on a sitcom. It doesn’t work as a thriller, or especially a comedy. 

It opens with a take on the classic horror movie fake-out where a sudden noise turns out to have just been the cat. Here, though, it comes from an obviously A.I. generated moose at the window. Winston (Grace) is a government witness who is hiding out at a motel in rural Alaska. He is found by US Marshal Madolyn (Dockery), and put on a small plane to Anchorage, where he will testify against a mob boss whose books Winston has been cooking. Enter the pilot, Daryl (Wahlberg), who isn’t really Daryl. He’s a hitman who has killed the real Daryl, and one of those movie villains with unlimited knowledge about the other characters – and of course, turns out to have a connection with them. Winston and Madolyn knock him out and handcuff him to the back of the plane, and now they are flying over the Alaskan mountains with little fuel and no aircraft experience.

The movie piles on with backstories, explanations, and twists that come at us right up to the last minute. I didn’t need to know so much of WHY this was happening. In fact, I would have been fine with the whole thing taking place on the airplane. I particularly didn’t need the subplot with the pushy, flirtatious air traffic controller who Madolyn speaks with off-and-on. “I can help you fly the plane, and get you on the ground, but once I do that, you’ll have to buy me dinner.”

I’m about to get a little spoilery, but with this movie, do you even care? It ends happily for all the characters we like, though for a time, it’s not looking great for one of them. That would have been interesting, and a courageous choice, if one of our heroes didn’t make it to the end credits – but alas, Flight Risk goes for a safe landing, so to speak. All the actors are in a different film, with Topher Grace being particularly annoying, trying to get laughs no matter what is happening. This was my biggest issue with it, but my favorite movie review podcast spent the majority of their airtime talking about how cheap-looking and sloppy with continuity it is. I agree with all of that, but it wasn’t my primary grievance. It goes to show that all over the internet, people are finding different things they dislike about Flight Risk.

Grade: C-