In my household we have a regular ritual we call “bad movie night.” We pull together snacks and a couple of beers, then fire up a doubleheader of movies that give license to turn off our brains for a couple of hours. It’s probably unfair to call them “bad” movies, because we don’t really mean they are shoddy; they’re just hacky. Complete predictability is key to the genre — plots with no real surprises, acting that’s purely sufficient, effects that are corny but passably cool, at least a few head-slapping lines. An amusement-park ride, basically, but from the comfort of the couch.
This is precisely the kind of entertainment that the airborne action movie “Flight Risk” aims to be. It feels directly dragged out of the 1980s and early 1990s, a time when Hollywood was devoted to turning out swarms of action flicks in which some flawed and downtrodden but good-hearted hero thwarts a devious conspiracy or an impending alien invasion or whatever. At that time executives also seemed convinced that you needed a love interest for people to be invested, so some kind of flirtation was awkwardly shoehorned in alongside the completely foreseeable twists and turns.
In “Flight Risk,” Jared Rosenberg’s screenplay traps its three stars for most of the 91-minute running time in a small plane high above a snowy Alaskan landscape. Madolyn Harris (Michelle Dockery), a U.S. marshal, needs to bring an informant named Winston (Topher Grace) from a remote location to New York, but their pilot (Mark Wahlberg) turns out to have other plans.
That’s basically everything you need to know about the movie. The rest plays out as a series of little fights in the plane, interspersed between close shaves with mountain peaks, a couple of uninteresting revelations about those on board (Wahlberg’s character being bald under his hat is treated as a major shocker) and a lot of stupid tactical choices by the marshal, who really ought to know better.
The strangest twist on offer in “Flight Risk” is that its director is Mel Gibson, whose part in the project seems to have been purposely downplayed by its distributor, Lionsgate. The poster only proclaims that the movie is from the “award-winning director” of “Braveheart,” “Apocalypto” and “Hacksaw Ridge,” with his name in tiny text near the bottom — an odd choice given that Gibson was once one of the industry’s most bankable actors and recognizable names.
Presumably Gibson’s very bad behavior on several occasions — including instances of antisemitic, racist and misogynistic remarks — is the reason for this elision. Whether that really matters to today’s mainstream audience remains to be seen.
But where “Flight Risk” fails as a film is not really Gibson’s fault. He knows how to shoot action sequences. The screenplay is instead all over the place, in a way that feels tired and halfhearted. This is the kind of thriller where you keep hollering at the characters to pay attention to the plainly murderous villain sitting a few feet behind them — campy fun in horror, less so in action. You’re left with a series of baffled questions: Why is someone so naïve and clueless working in high-stakes law enforcement? Why is the ground-control guy flirting with her incessantly? Why does it take her so long to put together the clues? Who can say?
Of course, feeling a little smarter than the characters is part of what makes the genre appealing — especially, I suppose, if you’re watching the movie on your TV while scrolling through your feed on a phone. And “Flight Risk” throws everything at the audience to keep viewers at least somewhat interested. You’ve heard of Chekhov’s gun, right? This movie has Chekhov’s gun, and Chekhov’s big scary knife, and Chekhov’s flare gun, and Chekhov’s Taser and, somehow, Chekhov’s sunglasses.
But despite the windup, it’s still sort of middling, second-screen action at best. Whatever the advertising suggests, Wahlberg isn’t the main star of the film, but he’s still the most interesting character. It’s been a while since we’ve seen him play a villain, after a long run of good-guy roles and reality shows in which he’s an enterprising entrepreneur and devoted dad. He’s a better and more believable actor when playing a villain, even if that villain is shockingly vile, repeatedly threatening his fellow passengers with creative euphemisms for rape and grisly murder.
Yet it’s not the villains that make a bad movie night good. What’s interesting about them in the aggregate is their glorification of ordinary law enforcement — the agent who’s retired but pulled in for one last mission, the soldier with a spotty past, the cop who’s estranged from his family but wants to save them. This says a lot about the culture in which they were released.
When these stories resonate, they reveal a profound mistrust of the top echelons of authority, bolstered by trust in the midlevel enforcer. As in “Flight Risk,” the true bad guy was often somewhere offscreen, the powerful or rich man who could pay someone else to do his dirty work. They were working the system to their advantage, and the system was inevitably rigged. Only the ordinary American could save the day.
Maybe it’s unsurprising to see those movies make a comeback. If we’re lucky, we’ll get some better ones than “Flight Risk.”
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