Mel Gibson’s Flight Risk takes off under promising conditions for fans of no-frills action flicks. After tracking down sardonic mob accountant Winston (Topher Grace) in Alaska, dogged U.S. Marshal Madolyn (Michelle Dockery) must accompany him back to New York to testify against his high-profile gangster boss. Enter a vigorously gum-chewing Mark Wahlberg as Daryl, the local pilot who will be transporting them to Seattle in his small plane. Except that Daryl, with his too-enthusiastic, down-home chattiness and increasingly uncomfortable personal overtures, clearly has dubious intentions, setting the stage for an explosive situation at 30,000 feet above the Alaskan wilderness.
Unfortunately, when that situation does pop off around the 20-minute mark, Flight Risk makes no real attempt to significantly up the ante for the remaining 70. At this point, it’s revealed that Daryl is really an enforcer for the crime boss who employed Winston, leading to a brawl in which Madolyn and Winston restrain him in the back of the aircraft. The subsequent drama, which largely concerns Madolyn trying to figure out how to pilot the plane while communicating with her possibly corrupt colleagues on the ground, proceeds to play out in a tediously derivative manner, particularly when it comes to the regularly scheduled moments when Daryl breaks free from his confinement to wreak some brief havoc before hastily being subdued again.
Every new plot development is so lazily copied from any number of plane-set thrillers that by the second or third time that Madolyn is instructed over the radio to turn on the autopilot, it’s hard not see that as a metaphor for the film itself. Which is to say, you would be justified in wondering what the bloodlust that often marks Gibson’s work might have brought to the table.
Indeed, given that Gibson makes little attempt to instill any sense of physicality to this dispiritingly paint-by-numbers affair, it becomes easy to understand the marketing of Flight Risk’s 4DX theatrical option as an act of overcompensation. Relying on bland CGI instead of crafting any memorable action set pieces, Gibson puts in about the same level of effort as he does in the scores of crummy VOD action films that he regularly acts in.
At least Wahlberg appears to be having fun. Daryl begins the film with a put-on (per Winston) “Larry the Cable Guy accent” before revealing himself as a venomous, bald-headed wise guy (his character’s “disguise,” a trucker hat with a toupee attached to the inside, is one of the film’s few inspired touches). And it’s at that point that Wahlberg grabs hold of the opportunity to go bad for the first time since his exquisitely campy breakthrough turn in James Foley’s Fear. But Flight Risk ultimately holds Wahlberg back, saddling him with tepid psychobabble dialogue when his character isn’t knocked out cold. If the film had opted to really let him go hog-wild, perhaps it would have spiced up its routine B-movie template enough to really soar.
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