Flight Risk (2025)
Directed by: Mel Gibson
Premise: A United States Marshal (Michelle Dockery) escorts an informant (Topher Grace) on a flight in a single engine plane. The pilot (Mark Wahlberg) is a hitman.
What Works: Flight Risk has a compelling concept: two people are trapped in a small plane with a killer. There is a satisfying internal logic to Flight Risk. Clues and props are set up and then paid off such as the killer’s knife which is established and then periodically comes back into the action. The cast includes Michelle Dockery as the marshal and Topher Grace as the informant. The two of them are a good pair with Dockery as the straight lead and Grace as the comic relief. Topher Grace is very funny but he’s also the character who is most obviously frightened and Grace gives the movie a lot of its emotional weight.
What Doesn’t: Dramas and especially thrillers generally succeed by creating narrative momentum which Flight Risk never achieves. The plotting feels very start and stop. Instead of a sense of imminent and escalating danger, the film has bursts of tension and excitement and then goes slack for long stretches. The filmmakers don’t make effective use of the claustrophobic possibilities of the setting. These characters are trapped in a confined space with a man who wants to kill them but the setting is not filmed in a way that capitalizes on that confinement. Most of Flight Risk plays in almost real time as these people fly over the Alaskan wilderness. The filmmakers don’t seem to know how to fill the time. The hitman, played by Mark Wahlberg, is incapacitated for periods of the story and even when conscious he is tied up and doing nothing, just sitting in the back of the plane in restraints. Wahlberg is miscast in this villain role. He’s threatening but he comes across cartoonish in part because of his very obviously fake bald cap. Flight Risk suffers from a lot of minor continuity errors. Perhaps owing to the intimate space inside the plane there are only so many angles to shoot the actors and their actions and posture are frequently out of sync from one shot to the next. The marshal determines that someone in her office is compromised and has set them up. This opens an entirely new aspect of the story that is not resolved and makes the ending unsatisfying. The characters never really escape the threat and the larger conflict does not come to a conclusion.
Bottom Line: Flight Risk is a disappointment. It’s a good idea poorly executed.
Episode: #1034 (February 2, 2025)