
Flight Risk
Studio: Icon Productions
Director: Mel Gibson
Jan 31, 2025
Web Exclusive
“Ya’ll need a pilot?”
So asks a bald Mark Wahlberg playing a hitman in director Mel Gibson’s Flight Risk. The action thriller centers on a killer pretending to be a pilot in a remote part of Alaska. He is tasked with murdering an informant named Winston (Topher Grace) before he can testify against a former employer. In the hitman’s way is U.S. Marshal Madolyn Harris (Michelle Dockery). The three are stuck together in a small plane with only the hitman knowing how to fly it.
Say what you will about Gibson as a person, but there is no denying his talent as an actor and director. As the latter, he has helmed such excellent and large-scale pictures as Braveheart (1995), Apocalypto (2006), and Hacksaw Ridge (2016). Flight Risk finds him working on a much smaller scale and with a B-movie premise. While Gibson attempts to inject some energy to the film, it ultimately winds up being a disappointment in his filmography.
The screenplay by Jared Rosenberg has a clever enough setup. The dialogue reads poorly, however—full of lame quips and rape jokes—and the situations between the characters are all predictable. Madolyn has help from outside sources for flying, she and Winston start to work together to survive, someone on her team is a traitor, etc.
The three main actors are unremarkable, too. Wahlberg is gleefully chewing the scenery in a villainous role, but he’s often relegated to the background as the hitman gets knocked out and/or handcuffed a few times. Dockery alternates between being wooden and unbelievable. Grace keeps hitting the comedy relief with the same note over and over.
Flight Risk has a few tense and thrilling moments along with some pretty mountain scenery, and it works best in the early scenes in the plane before Madolyn knows the pilot is a hitman. Gibson keeps the suspense tight in that section. But he loses his hold on the audience as the film grows more and more tedious, despite having a short 91-minute runtime.
Author rating: 4.5/10
Average reader rating: 3/10
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