Flight Risk Review: Never Leaves the Ground

With a solid premise watered down by uninspired directing and forced humor, Flight Risk is an instantly forgettable thriller that never leaves the ground.

But while Flight Risk doesn’t outright crash and burn, it never leaves the ground for the thrilling heights it could have reached.

Michelle Dockery (of Boy Kills World, which I still insist you see) plays Madelyn Harris, a Deputy U.S. Marshal. She’s tasked with flying a captured government witness, Winston (Topher Grace, of BlacKkKlansman), who will testify in a crucial case against a notorious mob boss. She’s aided by her pilot (Mark Wahlberg, of Arthur the King), who appears to be an affable, if eccentric, personality… until he’s exposed as a hit man sent to assassinate the witness on the mob boss’s behalf. And so, with this trio stuck in the air on a plane, Harris must take the pilot’s seat and find a way to land while also keeping the hit man – and a terrified Winston – in line. At the same time, she also needs to unravel the source of a leak within her division that allowed all this to happen in the first place.

As you could probably tell, that’s a lot for one character to deal with in such a precarious position. So why, then, can I count the number of moments I felt that immense pressure and tension on one hand? It’s certainly not the actors’ fault, because everyone is bringing solid work to their roles. Dockery works great as a composed Marshal who cracks like any person would but still keeps a strong external fortitude. Wahlberg’s scenery-chewing makes him an entertaining villain to watch, and Topher Grace manages to get some solid laughs as a squirmy, shifty crook with a good heart deep down. I emphasize the word “some” because of how desperately hard the film tries to make him funny nearly every minute he talks. And that doesn’t just stop with him.

Flight Risk goes for an unexpected number of laughs with its dialogue. Every single character outside of Harris wants to crack wise and make light of severe life-or-death situations with the frequency of an MCU protagonist. Winston’s antics get gratingly old after a while, and even Wahlberg’s smarminess becomes one-note and forgettable the more screen time he gets. Listen, if a character was to go, “This f**kin’ day,” after almost being suffocated to death in a dark comedy, fine. But here, in what’s otherwise supposed to be a legit thriller? That just gets under my skin.

Everyone in the movie sounds so unconvincingly wrong for their jobs that I was starting to seriously wonder if they were all imposters in cahoots with the fake pilot. This includes a character voiced by Maaz Ali, who remotely instructs Harris how to fly the plane while… jokingly(??) flirting with her. Not even Harris can get off scot-free, because the number of times she lets the exposed pilot slip free and attack pretty much in plain sight is frankly ridiculous. I know Mel Gibson has objectively terrible taste in government leadership, but I’d rather not see that incompetence represented in his movies.

But even all that aside, Flight Risk is shockingly unengaging in its overall delivery. Almost no sequence, no matter how intense on paper, leaves any sort of imprint in your mind even while it’s happening. There’s no claustrophobic cinematography, there’s no tension in the editing, the violence never looks or feels grisly, and even the wide, sweeping shots of the plane traversing Alaska are just… dull. That’s really the only way I can think to describe them. This looks like a Netflix original movie more often than not.

Even during the climax as the plane is forced to land, I only felt a fraction of the edge-of-your-seat suspense I should have felt because of how plain the presentation is on all sides. At the very least, some intense music could have amplified the stakes, but the score sounds like it’s falling asleep most of the time… or, dare I say, on autopilot. (I guarantee no one else will ever make that joke.) Again, I’ve seen fantastic directing from Gibson in the past, in movies far grander in scope, so I really don’t know what happened here.

Honestly, it’s only at this point that I remembered the attempts at character growth that are thrown into Flight Risk. They’re that forgettable. It’s revealed early on that this is Harris’s first job back on the field after a forced absence. We ultimately learn why she left, how it ties into a tragic past event for which she can now redeem herself, and how that then feeds into her connection with Winston, and… look, I’m being vague to avoid spoilers, but also because I really don’t have anything to say about this. It makes for an alright arc and nothing more, the end.

I’d say I’m grateful that Flight Risk is at least functional enough to not be a total disaster, but I may have actually preferred if it was. That would have gotten a much stronger, longer-lasting reaction out of me, maybe as a so-bad-it’s-good experience. But as is, I guarantee the very last time I’ll ever think about this movie is when this review goes live. Like a typical 90-minute flight, I found myself just sitting there waiting for it all to be over. And unlike a real flight, I was wishing the plane would crash just to make things interesting.

Flight Risk is now available to watch globally in theaters.