Fight or Flight (2025)
Directed by: James Madigan
Premise: A mercenary (Josh Hartnett) is hired to identify a hacker (Charithra Chandran) on an international flight and turn her in upon landing. The flight is full of assassins who are ordered to kill the hacker and her escort.
What Works: Fight or Flight is intended to be an action romp and it mostly succeeds at that. Violence in movies often has an inherently humorous quality especially in certain kinds of action and horror films and Fight or Flight approaches this material with an absurd sensibility. The violence is increasingly extreme, eventually becoming gory slapstick, and the aftermath of the set pieces has unusual details. Some of the characters have unusual costume design as though they crossed over from another movie. That quality shouldn’t work but it does as the unusual characters support the film’s quirky tone. Fight or Flight is led by Josh Hartnett as the heroic mercenary and Hartnett is in tune with the tone of the movie. He’s funny and sometimes manic but Hartnett also possesses an exhaustion that’s humanizing. Reluctance is one the key qualities of these kinds of heroes and Hartnett and the filmmakers draw out that quality. Fight or Flight is paced well. The movie builds efficiently with the violence and the stakes compounding. There’s a conspiracy brewing in the background and the film works in exposition on the go, revealing the backstories and larger agendas as the movie unfolds.
What Doesn’t: Fight for Flight reworks a premise we’ve seen plenty of times before, most obviously in the original Die Hard. This film is working with an even more specific subgenre in which a bunch of assassins compete for a shared target. We’ve seen this before in Lucky Number Slevin and Bullet Train, among others. A lot of those movies did the concept better, especially in creating colorful characters. The hitmen of Fight or Flight are mostly generic. Fight or Flight is an excessive film. The violence gradually gets bigger and gaudier. The excessiveness is kind of the point so it may be unfair to criticize the film for that. But the over-the-top violence of Fight or Flight also feels a bit empty. The movie is working on the Die Hard formula but the more successful iterations of that subgenre did interesting things with the characters and themes. The reluctant protagonist would prove something to himself and rescue hostages; that gave the violence and the overall story some meaning. Fight or Flight feels perfunctory. There’s little sense that anything meaningful has been won or lost.
Bottom Line: Fight or Flight is sufficiently entertaining. There’s not much to it and the premise has been done better in other movies but there is enough action and humor to make it worthwhile.
Episode: #1048 (May 18, 2025)