- Director: Mel Gibson
- Screenplay: Jared Rosenberg
- Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Dockery, Topher Grace
- Cinematography: Johnny Derango
- Editing: Steven Rosenblum
- Score: Antonio Pinto
- Genre: Action thriller
- Runtime: 91 minutes
Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. If you take a look out the left window; you’ll spot a smouldering wreckage, formerly an attempt to create a high-octane thriller by director Mel Gibson and writer Jared Rosenberg. I guess it didn’t land well.
Set almost entirely in the tiny confines of a private airplane, ‘Flight Risk‘ is a three-hander between a garrulous, gum-chewing pilot (Mark Wahlberg), a U.S. Marshal (Michelle Dockery) and an accountant-turned-mob informer deemed a flight risk (Topher Grace) as the trio fly over the Alaskan mountains towards the state capital Anchorage, so the snitch can transfer to New York City to testify against his former employer. Wahlberg is charmless, Grace is incredibly annoying as the backseat passenger you wouldn’t want to be stuck on a journey with, while Dockery tries in vain to save the movie from absurdity.
There’s enough action content to keep your focus – it’s watchable if you’ve switched your brain off beforehand like I did (notice how I didn’t say it was enjoyable though). Not Boeing at all. Boring, I mean. Within such a small space, there’s only so many tricks up its sleeve and a limited number of times punches can be thrown before it gets tiresome. A tight 91 minute runtime keeps things on track and no time is wasted getting too invested in the characters. Probably for the best.
But when Mark Wahlberg spouts the line ‘I just made a Jackson Pollock in my pants’, you’ll be scrabbling around for a parachute.
My rating: 5 / 10
SilverScreen 