Flight Risk (Christian Movie Review)
With poor direction, unlikable characters, and a lack of sustained suspense, Flight Risk fails to squeeze much entertainment value from its promising premise.
About the Film
The pressing question surrounding Flight Risk was whether it would be yet another generic action flick or if its intriguing creative talent on both sides of the camera would elevate the film to greater heights. The movie’s high-concept gimmick of an action thriller set almost exclusively within the claustrophobic confines of an airborne airplane is a fascinating idea. Unfortunately, its uninspired script results in a mostly turbulent ride. With poor direction, unlikable characters, and a lack of sustained suspense, Flight Risk fails to squeeze much entertainment value from its promising concept.
The story follows an air marshal (Michelle Dockery) who is tasked with transporting a crucial witness (Topher Grace) to a trial. Yet while aboard a small, local aircraft, she realizes that the pilot (Mark Wahlberg) is a hitman paid to kill them. On the surface, Flight Risk has all the makings of an edge-of-your-seat thriller. But surprisingly, director Mel Gibson—who, personal life controversies aside, is an indisputably skilled storyteller—becomes a liability.
The cramped confines of the airplane place strict limitations on the film’s action, and Gibson struggles to work within those parameters. The film fails to build or maintain tension when the characters aren’t engaged in a physical conflict. Rather than a slow burn of escalating tension, Flight Risk is a mostly uninspired character drama with brief bursts of action that quickly become repetitive.
The film lacks a clear identity or sense of purpose. It seems as though the filmmakers couldn’t decide whether to make a throwback 1990s pulp action flick or a more sophisticated thriller. As a result, it lands in the unsatisfying middle ground between those two tonal identities, never getting wild enough to work as “dumb fun” but featuring characters and dialogue that are too goofy to be taken seriously.
Mark Wahlberg has been on an interesting career path in recent years, but he isn’t given much to work with here. In fact, his character spends most of the film’s runtime handcuffed and incapacitated, left to sit in the back of the plane spouting profanities. He is more of an annoyance than a threat. The ease with which he is repeatedly foiled and captured also neuters his menace, despite the numerous close-up shots of his snarling and deranged face.
The “novice flying an airplane that’s running out of fuel” element of the story is equally uncompelling. Other than one brief instance when the plane has a close shave with a mountainside, there is little heightened drama or complications before the aircraft’s eventual landing. The film attempts to fill these lulls in the action with a contrived subplot involving a corrupt figure within the marshal’s office. But most of that storyline develops off-screen through phone calls with faceless characters, which strips the drama of any real punch. More consequentially, the film never communicates how this off-screen action impacts the primary story. Having a corrupt colleague has long-term career implications for the air marshal, but it doesn’t have much bearing on her immediate dilemma.
As a simple action/thriller with a mid-January release, audiences shouldn’t expect anything groundbreaking, but Flight Risk falls short of even modest expectations. It keeps viewers waiting for a payoff that never arrives.
For Consideration
Language: There is heavy profanity throughout, including frequent F-bombs, an array of other curse words, and some vulgar, sexually charged speech.
Violence: Characters are punched, stabbed , choked, and shocked with a taser(minimal blood is shown). A character is run over by a truck (his body is visible being hit and run over by the tires, but the scene is brief and not gratuitous).
Sexuality: There is plenty of crude and sexual language. A man repeatedly makes vulgar sexual advances toward another man, clearly implying his intention to rape him (whether the initiating man is sincere or merely trying to unsettle the other man is not entirely clear).
Engage The Film
A Life is Defined by Actions
Despite featuring creative talent in Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg, who have dipped their toes in some notable faith-based storytelling, there aren’t many redemptive themes for Christian audiences to embrace here beyond general motifs of perseverance and finding courage to overcome extreme circumstances.
One relatively more focused thematic throughline is the idea that outward appearances are deceiving and that actions are what truly define someone. On a superficial level, this theme is showcased by Mark Wahlberg’s character being something other than he presents himself to be. In a more meaningful way, the other two characters demonstrate this principle. The man who begins the film in handcuffs may not be as bad as he appears, and the air marshal transporting him has her own secrets and past traumas. Wahlberg’s character repeatedly taunts the marshal with the classic, “We’re not so different, you and I.” But over the course of the film, she comes to accept that her identity is not defined by her past but by her future choices.
Overall, this film aims to entertain rather than to explore deep themes. There’s not much intellectual meat on the bone, but audiences can affirm that good ultimately wins out in the end, and the characters who rise to the occasion to demonstrate heroism in the face of extreme trials.
