Directed By Mel Gibson

Starring – Michelle Dockery, Mark Wahlberg, Topher Grace

The Plot – In this high-stakes suspense thriller, Mark Wahlberg plays a pilot transporting an Air Marshal (Dockery) accompanying a fugitive (Grace) to trial. As they cross the Alaskan wilderness, tensions soar and trust is tested, as not everyone on board is who they seem.

Rated R for violence and adult language

Flight Risk (2025) Official Trailer – Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Dockery, Topher Grace

POSITIVES

Many elements to Gibson’s direction and overall decision making can be called into question, but urgency is never among them, eliciting top flight pacing throughout an 86-minute run time that is exploited in the daring depths of real time, in order to grant the audience insight and accessibility into the distance of the airborne trip. From the opening scenes pertaining to the backstory of this fugitive on the run, the script wastes little to no time setting the motions of the story to movement, establishing not only the rocky juxtaposition in dynamics between the Marshal and the fugitive, as well as the duo’s uncertainty about this wildly eccentric pilot that intrudes directly in the middle of their investigation, but also the anticipatory eruption in physical conflicts, which Gibson utilizes some uncomfortable interactions between the trio to flesh out a deeper sense of disconnection and distrust that ultimately define them. While the action sequences themselves leave plenty to be desired, particularly in the way they’re documented, these initial moments of establishing the stakes and setting a precedent are among the film’s highest cruising altitudes, affording limitless opportunities of emphatic expression from its talented trio, especially Wahlberg, in his single most unchained performance since 1996’s “Fear”. Like that predecessor, Wahlberg once more gets his hands dirty as the movie’s antagonist, and while much of his character’s background and motivations are left in the dark throughout the film’s exploration, Wahlberg delivers seamlessly on both the charismatically disarming side of his initial introductions to his two passengers and the audience, and the rivetingly animalistic side of his character’s ruthlessness, giving him every chance to effortlessly chew the scenery while muttering some crudely offensive and manipulative dialogue earning every inch of the sought-after R-rating. Michelle Dockery also continues her run towards one of Hollywood’s more eclectic filmographies, this time in the range of an action hero take-no-shit Air Marshal with enough resiliency and grit to invest in her, despite a lack of defined backstory that plagues her character. Dockery’s best moments are when she’s looking somewhere slightly off camera to gauge her various responses to on-ground developments, and though it does take most of the air of momentum out of the story in front of us, between these trio of characters, it affords the audience faithful reminder of Michelle’s methods of exploiting so much vulnerability and cunning intellect, cementing a protagonist who is as tough as a two dollar steak, but without the need to ever sacrifice the humanity that drives her morality.

NEGATIVES

It turns out that “Flight Risk” is one of those films where 90% of its material and memorable scenes are spoiled in the trailer. The other 10% are spread out among a sea of undesirably uninspired decisions to its screenplay that makes this one of the more frustrating executions to a concept that practically writes itself. For starters, the film feels a bit tone deaf during its opening act, with unnaturally forced responses conjured from Topher Grace’s fugitive that not only eviscerates the tension of the atmospheric rendering, but also leads to noticeable pockets of silence from an agitated audience who were constantly forced to endure the measuring stick for annoying characters, thus far in 2025. One or two throwaway gags are fine enough, in order to articulate the character’s nervousness of being between a rock and a hard place, but when the storytelling halts directly in place for Grace to carry out these observations that more often than not reach no effective destination, it makes it difficult to invest in him or empathize with his overwhelming conflict, a fact made clueless by an overly dramatic third act shift, which suddenly begs so unsubtly to ask you to care about him. Grace takes a majority of the blame, but the rest goes to the decision to utilize a suddenly emerging love angle between Dockery and an on-ground character who we only experience in vocal form. Each time the film earns even an inkling of panic, this voice comes on that hits on her character in the most desperate kind of assertiveness, and because she falls for it hook line and sinker, it speaks volumes about the lack of personal life that she has in working for the bureau, especially in that she’s wooed by someone who does nothing but talk her through flying a plane. Likewise, the film’s second half is just as troubling, if not more, than its first, as a developing on-ground narrative involving a leak among the bureau takes away far too much focus and momentum from the vulnerability at the foreground narrative, for characters and dynamic that we’re never given time to properly experience. This is most troubling because it takes time away from Wahlberg’s domination of the engagement, deducing him to feeling like a supporting character, all the while making so many of the physical conflicts between he and Dockery feel repetitive and lacking long-term conviction. It certainly doesn’t help that Gibson’s execution unknowingly telegraphs this during one particular conversation that pits the audience insightful knowledge at ten paces ahead of Dockery’s protagonist, leaving us waiting in place for her to catch up, with a delivery with the kind of impact as a paper airplane landing in an abandoned forest. In addition to an overabundance of ill-timed humor and focus shifts to the movie’s script, the first act has some productional aspects that make its cheap budget stand out like a sore thumb, primarily in the usage of green-screen backdrops and obvious model miniature sets that made this feel like one of the hundred Netflix action movies that I’m forced to review each year. Gibson’s inexperience keeps him from obscuring these issues in ways to make them bland naturally to the film’s presentation, so as a result we not only get inconsistent lighting schemes between foregrounds of the plane and backgrounds featuring snow-covered Alaskan mountainsides, but also these laughably distracting transitions that convey how the production was unable to completely film everything with on-site photography, in order to give it that effortlessly authentic feeling that comes naturally with experienced filmmakers. The action sequences pertaining to physicality between its trio of actors are just as troubling, as flawed technique among depiction has it sacrificing the vital tension and suspense that this movie’s marketing used to lure its unsuspecting audience into the auditorium. While the fight choreography is nothing special, made all the more difficult in the claustrophobic confines of a charter plane, the combination of overlapping editing and unappealing camera placements constantly underwhelm these rare but meaningful interactions, offering nothing in the way of satisfying pay-offs that could’ve smothered so many of the movie’s stacking problems. The editing could definitely use more longer takes to breed believability in the actions of its characters, as too often they’re sloppily cut and pasted to conjure an artificial reality, and while a plane doesn’t exactly offer an abundance of creative possibilities to convey and combine urgency with vulnerability, Gibson never even attempts to deviate from the flight plan of conventionalism, leaving these unflattering instances that annihilate the clarity and contextualism of conflicts that are emphasized too exaggeratingly by elements away from the actors involved.

OVERALL
“Flight Risk” desires climactic altitudes with an energetically unhinged Wahlberg performance, but ultimately cruises on autopilot, as a result of the uninspiring decisions within its floundering script and frenetic tonal imbalance that make this a strange sit, even for the man who helmed “The Passion of the Christ”. While the film is briefly urgent in its real time exploits of passing minutes, the urgency comes with a cost of character development and split time among an unnecessarily emerging on-ground narrative, leaving too much baggage on board for a film requiring less for more.

My Grade: 4.6 or D-