Flight Risk – Review

Cert – 15, Run-time – 1 hour 31 minutes, Director – Mel Gibson

Back-in-the-field Madolyn Harris (Michelle Dockery) is air marshal for fugitive witness Winston (Topher Grace), however a safe flight through the Alaskan mountains soon turns deadly when their pilot (Mark Wahlberg) turns out to have other intentions.

Flight Risk feels as if it could be perfectly described by a report card that simply says ‘Poor’. Not an abysmal waste of time, but certainly an underwhelming and tiresome film that’ll quickly be forgotten. Screenwriter Jared Rosenberg’s script appeared on the 2020 Blacklist and was quickly picked up, however with the most basic of basic dialogue cropping up throughout the film it feels as if surely lines and scenes must have been changed and tweaked to turn a praised script into a mundane slog.

Nothing throughout the run-time ever feels as if it properly gels, there are hints in the performances of the central three characters which suggest that their hearts are never fully invested in the project, not helped by Mel Gibson’s wobbly direction which feels uncertain as to where to move and place the camera in the cramped confines of the plane in which much of the events take place. Flying over the Alaskan wilderness to take fugitive witness Winston (Topher Grace) to New York to testify against the Moretti crime family, deputy marshal Madolyn Harris (Michelle Dockery) finds herself facing a pilot (Mark Wahlberg – sporting a dodgy semi-bald look which is never explained) who may in fact be working for someone after Winston.

Throughout the various scraps and last-minute course corrections I found myself distracted by both the amount of ugly shots in the film and the overall lack of fun that it seems to be having. There may be a number of attempts at jokes, only one or two of which gain something of a sympathetic chuckle, but as a whole the humour of the film seems lacking as its events feel as if they could be cut down into a 30-45 minute TV episode rather than a 90-minute feature, a thankful run-time however. There are occasional glimmers of amusement, even amongst the confines the film creates for itself in its single-location thriller aspect, but not quite enough to give it a proper lift.

Instead things trudge along with little to amuse and engage. Instead, I largely sat there rather bored by everything I was seeing, all of which felt somewhat detached and disinterested, having a similar effect on the audience. What appears to want to be a simplistic, stripped back thriller feels too stripped back and therefore basic. It leads to an uncertainly made and eventually messy 90 minutes, all rooted in a rather boring set of sequences.

Far too bland and lacking to create any proper engagement, Flight Risk trudges along without feeling as if anyone involved’s heart is truly invested in the project, creating a boring, even if not doing enough to be worked up about, set of events which lack the thrills and fun that something like this should have.