Ah, Mel Gibson. Mad Mel. The man who went from one of the biggest movie stars in the world to a relative pariah due to his alcoholism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and more. Unfortunately, Gibson is also a genuinely talented director of some very good movies which also happen to revel in violence, sadism, and twisted humor. And most recently, the actor-filmmaker seems to be gleefully sliding into a role as narc “ambassador” for the current administration. All of this being the case, many people refuse to engage with anything Gibson makes or appears in, and as the above laundry list shows, it’s certainly not without cause. But others still prefer to attempt to appreciate the art, if not the man and mind behind it. So where does one really draw a line? For some, that judgment may become easier if the movies just get boring.
Enter Flight Risk, Gibson’s latest directorial effort and one which, at least on paper, should be an easy double for him. An FBI agent (Michelle Dockery) is escorting a mob witness (Topher Grace) from middle-of-nowhere Alaska to Anchorage on a little single-engine prop plane. As it turns out, the pilot, Darryl (Mark Wahlberg), is actually a mafia hitman. A locked room movie set on a tiny aircraft with a legendarily bug-eyed maniac for a star and another legendarily bug-eyed maniac behind the camera seems like a tasty recipe, but strangely not a lot actually happens in Flight Risk. Instead, it’s mostly a two-hander, since Wahlberg’s cheerfully violent villain spends the majority of the movie either in character as a friendly pilot or subdued and handcuffed in the back of the plane.
The limited location certainly doesn’t allow for a lot of blistering action — nothing really gets cooking at all until the last 15 minutes or so — but a non-insignificant majority of the movie is spent with Dockery’s agent on the radio or phone trying to either land the plane safely or attempting to suss out which one of her colleagues is a mole for the bad guys. It doesn’t make for suspenseful or appealing viewing, even given Dockery’s game steeliness, which is a helpful contrast for Grace, cast absolutely to type as a motor-mouthed geek. Only Wahlberg, who hasn’t been interesting — or indeed been in anything interesting to watch — in ages, gets to (eventually) cut loose, sporting a goofy bald cap and hissing threats.
Gibson, for the most part, stages everything pretty economically, making good use of the camera to close the distance between characters in the enclosed space with focus changes and simple reverse shots. But with a couple of momentary exceptions, Flight Risk lacks his penchant for cinematic brutality or pervasive sadism. Only his juvenile sense of humor seems to remain in effect here, with Wahlberg constantly making quips about people shitting their pants and/or implying that he’s going to sexually assault Grace’s character. With Gibson at the helm, one must expect a certain, often considerable, degree of unpleasantness, but this doesn’t even rise to a bad first date level of upsetting. Flight Risk needed to be roughly 25% more rancid and a full 75% more exciting.
DIRECTOR: Mel Gibson; CAST: Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Dockery, Topher Grace; DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate; IN THEATERS: January 25; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 31 min.
Published as part of January 2025 Review Roundup
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