There are certain films that look incredible — on paper.
Those films are often put on the “Black List,” a register of the most-loved unproduced screenplays in Hollywood as determined by a survey of Hollywood machers. (Think the Associated Press and Coaches’ college football polls, but for people who earnestly say, “Let’s do lunch.”) Flight Risk, penned by rookie screenwriter Jared Rosenberg, made the Black List in 2020, and now Mel Gibson, in his first directorial effort in nearly a decade, has brought it to screens in the freezing doldrums of January.
Based on its taut, intuitive premise — an informant, a pilot, and an FBI agent are trapped on a small plane, and one is not who they seem — it’s easy to understand why the script caught producers’ imaginations. But like other, more “prestigious” Black List-ed atrocities, including the preposterous Jojo Rabbit and the offensively stupid Promising Young Woman, Flight Risk gilds the lily of its one (and only one) good idea until it smothers its audience with pointless embellishment and smug button-pushing.
Those curious about Gibson’s influence on the project should proceed with caution. His short but utterly sui generis filmography has thus far tended toward what one could call the “medieval operatic,” high historical melodrama drenched in gallons of blood and testosterone. His two most directorial efforts, 2006’s Apocalypto and 2016’s Hacksaw Ridge, were rightly lauded off-kilter takes on familiar genre fare, earning multiple Oscar nominations.
If Gibson’s auteurist touch is anywhere to be found in Flight Risk, your critic’s best guess is that he might have given notes on the “humor” in the film’s script, which is excruciating. Not exactly Mr. Chuckles in his public persona, The Office creator Greg Daniels once memorably described Gibson’s awkward efforts to strong-arm a Saturday Night Live writers’ room into doing a parody of Brideshead Revisited titled “Bird’s Head Regurgitated.”
Otherwise, Flight Risk is an aggressively conventional thriller, if an equally overplotted one. Topher Grace, who seems to have settled nicely into a second act of his career playing smarmy white-collar villains a la Paul Reiser’s turn in Aliens, plays a nebbish accountant on the run from both the mob and the law after informing on his one-time underworld superiors. Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey) is the FBI agent tasked with tracking him down and bringing him to court.
Filling out the film’s central triptych is Mark Wahlberg, sporting at first an unbelievable Hee Haw accent as the pilot of the small Cessna that will transport the three from remote Alaska to their relay point in Anchorage. It is not, I will trust, much of a spoiler to reveal that Wahlberg’s pilot isn’t what he seems to be, and he presently drops the silly voice and reveals himself to be a hitman sent by Grace’s former employer to ensure he never testifies.
What is there to say about Marky Mark that hasn’t already been said? Like President Donald Trump, he’s a man for our times: a Catholic kid so working-class it hurts, with a criminal rap sheet, a boy band career, a burger franchise, untold millions in Transformers money, and two Academy Award nominations to his name. He is, when deployed correctly, a stellar actor. He has the Charles Bronson-like quality of automatically centering every frame on his granite, unchanging scowl. His beautifully naïve, puffed-up masculinity was the magic material that made Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson’s career-launching minor masterpiece, into something more than pastiche, a touching cinematic künstlerroman for the celebrity age.
In Flight Risk, Wahlberg provides many, many chuckles — such as the film’s audaciously 30 Rock-esque tagline, “Y’all need a pilot?” — but most of them are unintentional. What’s intended to be his character’s unpredictable, psychotic menace, as he commits brutal violence and sexually threatens man and woman alike, is undercut by, first, the absurd tonsure that appears to have been the actor’s own choice. Second, well … it’s Marky Mark, and his singular celebrity persona works against him when his character’s unsettling threats are delivered in the same clipped Boston cadence the actor uses to pitch his prayer app and show off his daily workouts on Instagram.
Performances aside, Flight Risk commits the nearly unforgivable sin of turning a great thriller premise into laughably convoluted potboiler fare. Gibson, to be fair, beautifully captures the film’s setting. The Alaskan vistas as viewed from the airplane are appropriately sweeping, and most of all, the bumpy, tenuous-at-best experience of being in a single-engine plane far from civilization is conjured perfectly. The turbulence, the noise, each of the plane’s oh-so-important vibrating instruments feel real and appropriately claustrophobic.
That being said, especially for a film that was Black List-ed, the storytelling choices made in what should be a hyper-lean 90-minute thriller are baffling. Wahlberg’s thug is (temporarily) incapacitated early on, both taking the film’s most captivating screen presence out of the equation for too much of the film’s short runtime and setting up an idiotic suspense dynamic. In a plane barely large enough to seat a family dinner comfortably, Wahlberg manages, once tied up, to procure and use weapons and tools to free himself outside of the attention of the two protagonists, who have presumably popped a generous handful of Percocet to deal with the situational stress.
Add to this perplexing narrative a pointless betrayal plot regarding the FBI agent’s superiors and a running “joke” regarding the FBI agent’s remote flight coach, who pesters her so relentlessly and charmlessly for a date that one imagines she might prefer just to fly the plane into the side of a mountain and end it all. For cheap thrills, Flight Risk might just barely get the job done. But if you’re looking for the kind of claustrophobic suspense that made similar one-setting thrillers, such as Rear Window or David Fincher’s Panic Room, so memorable, the film delivers more of a reminder of why and how Hollywood bigwigs fall so often in love with their own tiresome non-cleverness.
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Derek Robertson co-authors Politico’s Digital Future Daily newsletter and is a contributor to Politico Magazine.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
