If ever you wanted a feature-length infomercial for streaming’s law of diminishing returns, Mel Gibson’s Flight Risk is your final boarding call. In a career littered with fury, fire, and the occasional flayed highlander, Gibson’s latest lands with the exhausted thump of an airline meal tray dumped in your lap at 30,000 feet. Once, he stormed battlements and made mayhem in Aramaic; now, he strands three actors in a metal tube and expects us to call it drama.
Confined almost entirely within the claustrophobic, dread-soaked fuselage of a Cessna, Flight Risk believes it can conjure Hitchcockian suspense with a pack of C-list passengers and the threat of a blood sugar crash. Mark Wahlberg is our pilot, and what a pilot: white-knuckled, humorless, and with a hairline hanging on by a single, desperate prayer. Wahlberg’s performance is all puzzlement and busywork—a man distracted by a crossword puzzle even as the movie barrels into the side of a mountain. If he's acting here, it's the acting of a man wondering why his coffee hasn't kicked in.
The plot is a game of whodunit that quickly devolves into a game of why-did-we-even-start. Michelle Dockery, molded here into a by-the-book U.S. Marshal with a bark so hollow it needs an echo, is meant to radiate moral certitude, but she seems to be calculating her per-diem with each passing shot. And then there’s Topher Grace’s accountant, shackled physically and emotionally, who spends the film clutching his briefcase and dignity in equal measure—both of which are gradually and methodically lost to the winds.
If “Flight Risk” aspires to thematic weight—betrayal, moral ambiguity, the existential terror of the infinite Alaskan wild—it achieves only the dread of watching a script that thinks referencing fog is the same as creating atmosphere. Every scene is like a knockoff “Key Largo” with the power cut, a bombardment of double-crosses and gunplay that have all the tension of delayed beverage service.
There are shots, yes, and editing—let’s call it that—though the visual style is less “auteur” than “one-camera community theater.” The icy chill of Alaska is represented by a single, fogged window and the suggestion that someone’s breath might condense if they dared to emote. Gibson, that old showman-cum-provocateur, is nowhere to be found. What we get in his place is the sensation that a retired mall Santa was allowed to shout “Action!” and then shuffled off to attend his own disciplinary hearing.
Even the film’s dramatic reversals—each meant to jolt you awake—land with the tragic inevitability of airline pretzels spilled into your lap. It is a masterclass in missed opportunity, a roulette of pulp nonsense where the only safe bet is that Wahlberg’s brow will furrow, Dockery’s jaw will set, and the audience’s patience will be tried.
You will search in vain for kinetic spectacle or, failing that, even a halfway memorable line. Dialogue is doled out with the formal cheer of a TSA announcement. “Turbulence ahead” might as well be stamped on each frame.
If there is a single triumph here, it belongs to Wahlberg’s migrating hairline, which brings more drama and mystery to the screen than the cast’s combined attempts at peril.
“Flight Risk” wants to be a taut, stripped-down thriller, but it’s all stripped and no thrill, a meditation on the agony of being stuck—midair, mid-movie, mid-sigh. I left the film musing on the strange resilience of airplane coffee and the missed catharsis of a plot crash that never comes. Some movies are merely bad; this one is an unscheduled layover in cinematic purgatory.
In the end, you won’t remember who was shackled in the backseat, who pulled the trigger, or why you checked in for this flight at all. What lingers is the sensation of time itself—something precious, vaporizing as you watch “Flight Risk” taxi forward but never, ever really take off.
