Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Flight Risk’ Review: Mel Gibson’s Latest Directorial Effort Stalls Before It Gets Off the Ground
Lionsgate’s advertising campaign for “Flight Risk” credits its latest film to “the award-winning director of ‘Braveheart,’ ‘Apocalypto’ and ‘Hacksaw Ridge’,” which seems a circumspect way of recognizing Mel Gibson as its helmer. Unfortunately, the movie’s problem is not that it lacks Gibson’s name, but his personality as a filmmaker. Reminding audiences of those very good pictures sets expectations way, way too high ahead of watching this cheap-looking, shoddily-made, lifeless thriller.
Working from a Black List darling of a script by up-and-comer Jared Rosenberg, Gibson recruits his “Father Stu” co-star Mark Wahlberg to play the villain in a containment thriller that doesn’t even need Academy Award-winning talent, just basic proficiency and a bit of finesse in order to keep viewers on the edge of their seats. What he instead delivers is a crude, unimaginative, suspenseless adventure whose tension mostly derives from deciding which of its three main characters will prove the most unlikable by the time it ends.
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Michelle Dockery (“Downton Abbey,” “The Gentlemen”) plays Madelyn Harris, a deputy U.S. marshal escorting a fugitive-turned-informant named Winston (Topher Grace) — who’s never given a last name, not even in the press notes — back to civilization from his hideout in a remote Alaskan town. Eager to prove herself after a traumatic incident with a former witness, Madelyn vows to execute her responsibilities by the book, regardless of Winston’s nonstop stream of disruptive wisecracks. But when their transport arrives, not only is it a rickety cargo plane with just three seats, but it’s piloted by Daryl Booth (Wahlberg), whose cornpone drawl, tenacious curiosity and blood-stained clothes immediately strike Madelyn as suspicious.
Once in the air, both Madelyn and Winston discover that Daryl is not who he claims to be, and a scuffle ensues between the marshal and Winston’s would-be assassin. She successfully subdues him, handcuffing “Daryl” in the plane’s cargo hold, but soon identifies a bigger problem than a homicidal passenger hellbent on killing her and Winston: How will the three of them land?
Reaching out to her superior officer Van Sant (an offscreen Leah Remini), Madelyn recruits another marshal, Hasan (Monib Abhat), to help her get the plane back on course, and hopefully on the ground. But when she discovers documents in Daryl’s pockets containing privileged information about both Winston and herself, Madelyn realizes that someone within her department has been feeding information to the crime lord Winston is supposed to testify against, and it’s up to her to figure out who it is by the time she’s successfully landed their aircraft onto the nearest tarmac.
Although no one would reasonably expect Gibson to take Wahlberg, Dockery and Grace up in the air and shoot this mostly real-time thriller even in approximately authentic conditions, the most glaring detail about the film is how phony it all looks. And that’s even before the characters get in the plane. Two establishing shots, one of a snow-covered Alaskan hotel and another, the runway they’re departing on, look embarrassingly unrealistic. (Don’t even get me started on the moose that pops up in Winston’s hotel window.)
The filmmakers reportedly shot the aerial sequences using The Volume, the state-of-the-art soundstage that produces (supposedly) photorealistic backdrops, but Gibson seems out of his depth with the technology, and the end result is less convincing than one of the painted landscapes that might have been used in his “Air America” days. Worse, he scarcely defines — much less explores — the spatial geography within the cockpit, so every tracking shot or zoom used to capture the action feels more obligatory than purposeful.
All that said, what appears to have been on the page for Gibson and his actors to work with is at once overwritten and emotionally anemic. Madelyn, Winston and Daryl are all “types” more than they’re actual characters, each binding their expository backstories together with relentless one-liners that are never, ever funny. This “humor pass” to the script ends up making Dockery, Grace and Wahlberg seem like they’re playing at their roles instead of inhabiting them, and as a consequence, the few actual moments of quiet feel uncomfortably stifling — like no one, least of all Gibson, knew what to do to breathe life into them. To say that literally everyone in the film is (or thinks they are) a comedian is not much of an exaggeration, but their hacky material causes far more harm than any of the weapons that change hands during its running time.
Casting Dockery as Madelyn is an admirably unconventional choice, but there are simply too many actresses better suited for the role than her, and she always seems like she’s straining to convince the audience that she’s this bruised but nail-tough U.S. marshal. One supposes that the Cobie Smulders and Emily Van Camps of the industry, to name but two, were either otherwise occupied with more pedigreed opportunities or might simply have refused to work with Gibson, regardless of the extent that his reputation has been semi-rehabilitated. But again, the script does Dockery no favors, and for better or worse, she fails to convince that there’s a better reason than professional incompetence as peace officer why Madelyn repeatedly ignores Daryl — to her peril — in a space it would take less than two seconds to fully survey.
Wahlberg seems to relish his chance to play the kind of over-the-top bad guy that action movies mostly discarded after the 1990s, but that doesn’t mean he delivers an effective performance. Even his bald spot feels like it’s overcompensating for something, and unfortunately it’s clear what that is: believable motivation. On the other hand, Grace has played these sorts of quick-witted milquetoasts so many times that his casting must have felt to the production like a coup, but his skill set sadly gets washed away in the firehose of the film’s “humor.”
If one is compelled to inextricably correlate the art and the artist, there are any number of reasons for viewers to avoid new work from Mel Gibson. But the strongest in this particular case is that it’s artistically bereft — devoid of suspense, style or even a rudimentary mastery of technique. In which case, Lionsgate’s marketing campaign for “Flight Risk” may be a blessing in disguise, because it may be better for the film’s commercial prospects for it not to be associated with his name, but it’s almost certainly better for his career for his name to not be associated with this film.
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