Flight Risk

Flight Risk Movie Review Rating:

Star Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Dockery, Topher Grace

Director: Mel Gibson

What’s Good: The initial premise is fabulous and gives legs to the film the entire runtime.

What’s Bad: The film never fulfills the promises made by the setup, which creates a frustrating scenario that brings the film down.

Loo Break: The film allows for several loo breaks, as many of the characters’ choices don’t make much sense, so you won’t miss any pivotal moments.

Watch or Not?: Sadly, this film is a pass unless you’re a huge Mark Wahlberg fan.

Language: English (with subtitles).

Available On: Theatrical Release

Runtime: 91 Minutes.

User Rating:

Opening:

Mel Gibson’s career has been quite remarkable. Coming very young off the success of the original Mad Max worldwide, the actor then went to Hollywood, where he became a movie star, and a respected film director, only to fumble under nasty declarations and political matters that put him on Hollywood’s blacklist. However, it is undeniable that Gibson is immensely talented, and we expect a lot from him because he has given us greatness before. Sadly, Flight Risk is not the greatness we and he deserve.

Flight Risk Movie Review: Script Analysis

From a script point of view, the film delivers quite an interesting and delightful premise that reminds us of Agatha Christie’s mystery thrillers, trying to find who is who and who will do what and when. These types of stories are pretty entertaining, and writers and filmmakers have made a career out of them. Just look at what Rian Johnson is doing at Netflix with his Knives Out films, and yet, these stories, while fun, need to be well-researched and planned unless you want to make the audience angry.

Nowadays, audiences are very intelligent, media savvy, and can detect and predict many things happening at all times. While being unpredictable is great, it shouldn’t be the end goal of a film or story because even when a story is very predictable, audiences will forgive it or don’t care if it is well executed. In the case of Flight Risk, the execution falls short for several reasons, including tone, acting, and not being committed enough to be what it should be: a thriller.

The script tries to assign too many things to too many characters, and while it works for some of them, you can definitely see that there are many characters who don’t serve a purpose or are even interesting. This creates the sensation that the film is wasting the audience’s time, and not being committed enough to the genre avoids giving the story the punch it needs to connect with audiences.

Instead of being a really intense thriller, which will probably be what audiences expect when watching this, the story also tries to be funny and lighthearted. It just doesn’t work as all these tries at being funny feels like filler, leaving the more interesting plot points only to receive just enough runtime to make the story work, sort of, and for a film that is just about the 90-minute mark, it becomes evident that the writer, Jared Rosenberg, just didn’t have enough story to cover 90 minutes. Compromises were made to stretch that runtime.

Flight Risk Movie Review: Star Performance

In terms of performances, the film is all over the place, and it is, of course, Mark Wahlberg the one that comes off best, delivering a very intense and powerful performance as Daryl Booth, a hitman involved in a job that gets more and more complicated as time passes. Wahlberg is in the poster, and you would think that he is the film’s main focus, but he is not. He has to share screen time with other less interesting characters, dramatically diluting the film’s impact. Wahlberg might look ridiculous as a bald man, but the actor overcomes that and triumphs in the end.

The same cannot be said for Dockery, who has never been very good in any movie I’ve seen her in. I’m sure she is an amazing person and probably a very good actress, but the roles and projects she is on always end up being disappointments. The same happens here in Flight Risk; her character and performance feels undercooked. Topher Grace fares better, but his character becomes annoying as the film continues, which is a shame.