Director Mel Gibson probably made Flight Risk with Netflix’s “90-minute movies” slot in mind (in fact he overshot – it lasts 91 minutes). It hits the spot of “escapist no-brainer action flick” by being lean, sharply-focused and amusingly preposterous, and Gibson keeps the pace brisk enough that you don’t have time to dwell on the really daft bits.
Perhaps taking a cue from Three Men In a Boat, Flight Risk is Two Men and a Woman on a Plane. The latter is a battered old Cessna in which quite a few gadgets don’t seem to work properly. It’s flying deputy US Marshall Madolyn Harris (Michelle Dockery, with a steely glint in her eye) and bent accountant Winston (Topher Grace) to Anchorage, Alaska. Winston is a key federal witness in the trial of a fearsome mobster called Moretti, and is being dragged reluctantly back to face the legal music.
With a spindly $10m budget (that would get you about 35 seconds of Ridley Scott), Gibson and screenwriter Jared Rosenberg have worked hard to make the most of their limited resources. As the aircraft dips and wobbles its way across huge Alaskan vistas of snow, ice and mountains, the plot is thrown into overdrive when it gradually dawns on the passengers that the pilot, Daryl (Mark Wahlberg), is not who he claims to be, and has very little interest in reaching their destination. Behind his corny down-home bonhomie lurks something monstrous, and there's a maniac's hairstyle under his baseball cap (pictured below, Topher Grace and Michelle Dockery). He's reminiscent of Jack Nicholson at his craziest.
The film-makers have to pick up the gauntlet of making a whole lot of things happen in a very tiny confined space. They deploy some crafty devices, like the moment where Winston, chained up in the back seat, makes a horrifying discovery, but despite his increasingly hysterical efforts to alert Madolyn, she can’t hear him because she and Wahlberg are talking to each other through headphones in the front seats. Meanwhile, we get a bit of back-story about the protagonists, and a secondary plot develops as Madolyn keeps in touch with her workmates back at HQ via her sat-phone (lucky she was carrying one of those, eh?). It dawns on her that there’s more to the Moretti case than she previously suspected.
Violent and hair-raising events crop up at regular intervals, during which the protagonists make use of anything that comes to hand – a flare pistol, a fire extinguisher, fists, cable ties, a Taser… Somehow the plane stays in the air, despite one thoroughly unfeasible encounter with a mountainous snowdrift, and as the journey unfolds they get a bit of help from a pilot, Hassan (Maaz Ali), who flirts comically with Madolyn over the radio.
Flight Risk delivers plenty of short, sharp shocks, skilfully exploits its limitations, and lots of the fancier critics hate it. Get in!
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