Flasz On Film

A long, long time ago there was this blissful time when if you heard a news item that involved Mel Gibson, it would most likely be about him making another movie. And you’d be at least a little bit excited because it might mean another Mad Max movie was in the works, or maybe another instalment of the Lethal Weapon series was being put together. Or maybe it would be about a movie that Gibson would be gearing up to direct, which would still be a largely positively charged phenomenon since even his early directorial outings were generally positively received. Braveheart even earned him the Best Director Oscar too.  

But these times are long gone, brother and for nearly twenty years now—just about since before the release of his undisputed masterwork Apocalypto—any piece of news with Mel Gibson in the headline has been a gamble because you wouldn’t possibly tell if he just signed up to star in a movie, decided to direct something, or got himself into trouble with the police while intoxicated while spouting slurs for no good reason. Quite frankly, today it’s not even a gamble anymore. Mel Gibson news tends to be uniformly bad.  

So, to keep this trend going, have I got news for you. I went and saw the Mel Gibson-directed Flight Risk and I am here to report that it is not good at all. And this, to be perfectly honest, probably hurt me even more than heaving learned recently that Gibson, together with Sylvester Stallone and Jon Voight, kissed Trump’s ring and agreed to become some kind of a made-up ambassador for entertainment. In fact, I felt more downbeat about the movie than I would have if instead of directing a new movie, Gibson had gotten himself into trouble again over saying some off-colour stuff. And that’s probably because, warts and all, his directorial work has always been quite interesting.  

I mean on paper Flight Risk actually does look like an intriguing concept that with a degree of genre awareness and a good handle of violence-led suspense (which has always been Gibson’s forte) could have had what it takes to become a sleeper hit among filmgoing dads. The premise is simple: a federal agent (Michelle Dockery) is tasked with escorting a key witness (Topher Grace) in a high-profile case against a powerful mob kingpin. They are flown in a small plane across the mountainous wilderness of rural Alaska by a sassy pilot with a baseball cap on backwards and a thick Southern accent (Mark Wahlberg). What the agent and her handcuffed charge do not know is that the pilot is not who he says he is and that he is in fact a contract killer sent by the mob to execute the witness before he has the chance to open his mouth under oath. 

Simples. Flight Risk could be a localized and tense thriller confined to the interior of a small plane and using the features of its location to generate suspense and exhilaration. Unfortunately, it does no such thing and instead offers the viewer the kind of entertainment they’re likely to uncover while dumpster-diving into the bottom shelves of the Netflix library looking for an action movie they haven’t seen yet… only to switch it off exactly fifteen minutes later, having realized what they signed up for by pressing play was nothing short of a waste of time.  

However, Gibson’s movie is not a direct-to-Prime release-and-forget vehicle for Liam Neeson or Gerard Butler, most of which are actually quite a bit better than what Flight Risk is. This is a movie that—thanks to the simple fact this time of the year is sparse in quality releases and hence it is seen as a dumping ground for movies you’d normally find on the small screen—actually has no business being in cinemas. In contrast to movies like Greenland or Plane, which do attempt to utilize the cinematic format at scale, this movie just does nothing of the sort. In fact, I’m not sure what exactly it is attempting to lean into because a small and confined single-location thriller can use the scope of a large-screen presentation to envelop the viewer in its claustrophobic setting or in the constricted headspace of the characters without ever needing to deliver on epic visuals. It’s just a poor attempt at a movie whose thrills are nowhere to be found, whose action is dead on arrival and whose own attitude doesn’t even allow the viewer to see what unfolds on the screen before them as camp.  

Granted, there is a degree of eyebrow-raising novelty baked into the conceptual idea of making Mark Wahlberg’s character look as though he identified as a 17^th century samurai with his bald spot purposefully shaved into an otherwise full head of hair, but it wears off after exactly thirty seconds-worth of acclimation. In a way, I wished the movie pressed a bit harder on the preposterousness of this character—and by extension the entire story—because at least then I could see it as an attempt at doing something consciously ludicrous. Like that time when Ray Liotta played a wildly off-kilter serial killer stuck aboard an airliner in Turbulence, a movie Flight Risk is conceptually related to in more ways than one. However, that piece of 90s trash (which also starred Lauren Holly still enjoying her post-Dumb and Dumber period of A-list-adjacent recognition) was at least trying to look serious while coming across as preposterous and camp. Gibson’s movie wants to be sassy and cool, as though the writer on this project (Jared Rosenberg for whom Flight Risk is his first feature screenwriting credit) looked up to the writing efforts by one Shane Black with unwashed adulation.  

Therefore, in a directorial filmography that is as sparse as it is strong, Flight Risk stands out like a bolognaise stain on a well-pressed dress shirt. Well, that’s probably a bit imprecise. Nobody in their right mind would ever compare Gibson’s filmography to a spotless shirt. It’s a shirt alright, but it’s best to describe it as thoroughly and irretrievably marked with bloodstains. And Flight Risk is that one bolognaise stain on it. The wrong shade of red. A total impostor. 

Undermined by its all-too-frequent attempts at humor and just as often undone by the filmmakers’ inability to cash in on simple yet cool elements of the setting, like the fact that thanks to the noise in the cockpit, the characters would find it hard to communicate without their headsets and perhaps inadvertently allow for things to happen behind their backs without their knowledge, Gibson’s movie is just too frustrating to watch without actively considering jumping out of the window without a parachute or a plan to safely land outside of the cinema. And I know it might come across as fundamentally strange, but at this point I fully expected Mel Gibson to at least lean into the unnerving visceral realism of on-screen violence he had incorporated before into Hacksaw Ridge, Apocalypto and (infamously so) The Passion of the Christ. Though I didn’t want any of the characters to go through hell of the kind Jim Caviezel’s character was subjected to as Jesus, I think it would have added some much-needed oomph if whatever transpired aboard that little single engine winged noise factory was deemed too hot for TV by the battalion of well-paid prudes over at the MPAA and the BBFC.  

Alas, Flight Risk just doesn’t work and quite frankly does not belong with other movies Gibson directed in the past. The script conceptually paints itself into a corner several times with the way it orchestrates sudden reversals of fortunes that simply do not make much sense to anyone in the audience, while probably thinking it’s quirky and cool because Joss Whedon, Drew Goddard and Shane Black would have probably leaned in the same direction. And maybe it would have worked in other people’s hands, though I seriously doubt it, to be perfectly honest. However, everything else about this movie—between the loosely sketched conspiracies unfolding in phone calls, shallow grooves of poorly covered-up trauma carved into the characters and the potential for a climactic and exhilarating orgy of violence serving as the much-required resolution to the story—suggested it would have benefited from treating itself completely seriously. In doing so, it would have had no chance of failing because at best it would have been a gritty genre piece in no mood to apologize for its own self-serious tone, or at worst it would have been—as I mentioned above—camp.  

But it isn’t and thanks to these edgy look-at-me-I’m-so-self-aware-and-cool storytelling devices, Flight Risk looks desperate. Not effective. I can only hope that Mel Gibson comes back from this—if his “ambassadoring” for Trump doesn’t put an end to his filmmaking career, that is—but it won’t be easy. These bolognaise stains tend not to come out in the wash that easily.