REVIEW: ‘Flight Risk’ Is The Worst Airplane Watch

With little else to rely on, the chamber piece is cinema distilled into its purest form as the fruit of three basic elements: Writing, acting, and cinematography. Imbued with the right ballet of style, panache, and character, four walls or a rickety vehicle can be rendered worlds onto themselves. Confinement serves less as a barrier to creativity and more as a catalyst for subversion and innovation. Mel Gibson’s Flight Risk (his first directorial effort in nine years) aims to continue in that tremendous filmic tradition but manifests as an experience that treats its single location like an albatross.

Gibson’s film wastes no time in clipping its own wings, unfolding not only as a flightless exercise in tedium but a sorely missed opportunity—one that goes out of its way to ground the core filmmaking elements its sub-genre rests upon.

Opening with a poor synthetic rendering of a motel amid the Alaskan wilderness (an omen for even clunkier filmmaking yet to come), Flight Risk opens on Winston (Topher Grace), an ex-mob accountant-turned-government witness hiding away from the feds and his former employers. When he’s nabbed by U.S Marshall Madelyn Harris (Michelle Dockery), the two hop on a plane bound for Anchorage only to realize that Daryl Booth (Mark Wahlberg), the pilot transporting them, is an unhinged hitman sent to stop them. The three are then forced to fly together aboard a precarious aircraft while Madelyn uncovers a conspiracy in her department.

Gibson, who made a career out of vast historical epics like the Oscar-winning Braveheart and Apocalypto, finds his typically unmoored lens firmly grounded. In a more purposefully photographed film, this aerial setting would have transformed into a character itself. However, the aircraft that occupies this tale is so ill-defined and non-interactive that it amounts to little else but an elevated stage posing as a cockpit. Gibson’s handcuffed camerawork is the amalgamation of the same few close-ups, mightily laboring to foster a sense of tension and dread that would otherwise cloak how readymade this film looks for portable background streaming.

Flight Risk is a visual and narrative failure. 

Toss in some highly questionable visual effects and a strong case of over-lighting, and Flight Risk is as shoddy as the airplane it takes place in. Yet, the true sour taste of Gibson’s film lies in the unrealized potential of its setting, which looms heavy over its rickety 91-minute runtime.

For a film that hopes to channel a sense of campy excitement, it squanders the opportunity to truly relish the precarious absurdity of its premise. Instead, it unfolds as a visual eyesore that features entire sequences jerry-built from awkward CGI. An early scene consists of a whole airstrip that feels patched together from a collage of Getty images. Before it takes flight, Gibson’s haphazard direction undermines any momentum the film hopes to foster.

As visually airless as Flight Risk is, the character moments that occupy the frame undercut the film’s main engine. The story, penned by Jared Rosenberg, quickly works to establish an odd-couple dynamic between Winston and Madelyn but is wholly one-sided. It’s deeply reliant on Grace’s whiny bantering to generate laughs, garnering diminishing returns swiftly. Madelyn’s stone-faced demeanor becomes especially difficult to invest in, particularly in an arc regarding her battered self-confidence in the wake of fumbling a past prisoner detail. It’s a quality amplified by Dockery’s strait-laced performance, which stresses the explicit over the internalized fears and hopes of her character.

Then there’s Booth, the film’s unhinged centerpiece, who is barely in it. Armed with one of the worst bald caps in recent memory, Wahlberg turns in a one-note, maximalist performance that’s more cartoonish than imposing. At its best, Booth is a caricature that devolves into a vessel for the film’s own latent homophobia, where the threat of sexual assault is played for awkward laughs. The inclusion of Hassan (Maaz Ali), an air traffic controller who helps Madelyn fly the plane, only exaggerates the film’s comedic shortcomings, as he indulges in the worst kind of office humor.

While Flight Risk attempts to recall 90s genre cinema, it culminates in an experience that would have been outdated decades earlier. Drawing from its title, Flight Risk appears as a perfect airplane watch. But what limits Gibson’s film from achieving even that honor is that it’s a chamber piece concept that had the potential to be a winner. 

Flight Risk is in theaters on January 24, 2025.