Flight Risk (dir. Mel Gibson)

by Jack Martin | Jan 25, 2025

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 91 mins

UK Distributor: Lionsgate

UK Release Date: 24 January 2025

WHO’S IN FLIGHT RISK?

Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Dockery, Topher Grace, Monib Abhat, Paul Ben-Victor

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Mel Gibson (director, producer), Jared Rosenberg (writer), Bruce Davey, John Davis and John Fox (producers), Antônio Pinto (composer), Johnny Derango (cinematographer), Steven Rosenblum (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A hit man (Wahlberg) poses as a pilot to kill his latest target…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON FLIGHT RISK?

The rise and fall and rise (again) and fall (again) of Mel Gibson will surely be studied by film historians in years to come. Once a reliable A-list movie star, and then later an Oscar-winning filmmaker, his infamously anti-Semitic 2006 arrest and some even more damaging racial outbursts seemingly exiled him from Hollywood, until a slew of memorable character roles and even the acclaimed war drama Hacksaw Ridge briefly brought him back into people’s good graces, which has now been hampered by his alarming embrace of right-wing politics, culminating in his recent appointment, alongside Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone, as an official Hollywood ambassador for the Trump administration.

But somehow, the most humiliating low of Gibson’s career and public image is the fact that Flight Risk, his first directorial outing in nearly ten years, is perhaps among the worst movies he’s ever been directly involved in. And that’s saying a lot, given the direct-to-video garbage he’s been largely popping up in recently.

The film, from a script by Jared Rosenberg (which apparently popped up on the 2020 Black List of best unproduced screenplays), begins with Deputy US Marshall Madelyn Harris (Michelle Dockery) tracking down fugitive mob accountant Winston (Topher Grace) to an Alaskan motel, one that comes with its own CGI moose that’s so badly rendered it almost makes the babies from The Flash look like Gollum in terms of visual effects. After Winston agrees to testify against his gangster boss, Harris arranges for a charter plane to transport them to New York for the trial – but the problem is that their pilot, a balding man named Daryl (Mark Wahlberg), is actually a sadistic assassin hired to kill the informant, leaving Harris to rely on radio support so she can fly the plane to safety.

What is striking about Flight Risk, and not in a good way, is how shockingly cost-effective it looks. That CGI moose is a mere precursor to some absolutely dire visuals that Gibson somehow allowed to be all over his final cut, including an early shot where you can blatantly see the green screen behind the superimposed figures, while the rare outside shot of this aircraft flying over the mountains is less realistic than if it was an actual cartoon plane. Meanwhile, the tiny interior that we spend the bulk of the movie in is strangely underutilised, as the viewer never really gets a proper establishment of the area for some of the later set-reliant sequences to hit their mark, limiting the potential for it to truly feel cinematic despite the chamber-piece setup.

It screams of being shot on the cheap during the actors’ strike (which would partially explain why, outside our three leads, this world seems vastly underpopulated), and because of that it severely limits what it can and can’t show outside this tiny airborne plane, or even within it. Anyone expecting some intense action will leave feeling short-changed, for the small and enclosed set restricts the range in which these actors can perform, and even then they don’t make the most of the space, spending most of the film swapping dialogue rather than do anything that raises the stakes in any meaningful way. For much of it, Flight Risk remains incident-free, as there’s only so much that can happen within such a confined area, and the lack of urgency – even when certain characters are critically injured – makes the viewer even less entertained since nothing of consequence appears to be going on for an elongated period of time.

The actors, though talented, suffer under the direction of someone who apparently still thinks it’s the 90s, when certain acting choices and mannerisms were perhaps more acceptable than they are now. For instance, Mark Wahlberg – donning an unflattering bald look that makes him look like he’s auditioning to play Gargamel in a Smurfs porno spoof – goes wildly over-the-top in some scenes, not too dissimilar to how Gibson himself might have played this role if he was cast back in his heyday, but given what we now know about the kind of person Gibson is, not to mention Wahlberg in some respects, the character’s one-note sadism is less fun now than it may have been in 1995. Elsewhere, you have Topher Grace straight up doing an impression of Michael J. Fox throughout the whole film, complete with whiny vocal tics and tone-disrupting comedy one-liners (all of which are far less charming than Fox himself may have handled it), while Michelle Dockery feels miscast in a tough-as-nails role blatantly written for someone like Sandra Bullock or Hilary Swank, which try as she might the Downton Abbey alumni cannot entirely pull off.

With its low-cost production values, questionable performances, and a looming sense of boredom during the uneventfulness of it all, Flight Risk is the kind of film that would have ended up going direct-to-video if it weren’t for the names attached both on and off the screen. Its woeful execution of a passable if creatively limiting concept leaves one wondering if Mel Gibson will find a way to bounce back as he did before. His current politics, as well as his appointment by the new Orangutan-in-Chief, make it less likely than ever that he’ll be embraced once more by the industry that once made him a star, but even if there was still some hope for him, the shoddiness of his filmmaking here might just well have put his career on autopilot for good.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Flight Risk is a woefully executed airborne thriller with few thrills and even less engagement, thanks to Mel Gibson’s noticeably cheap use of sets and effects that limit the scope of the central concept that not even his struggling actors can save, causing it to nose-dive straight into the depths of the ocean.