Flight Risk Is Not the Right Kind of Dumb

This gimmicky thriller, directed by Mel Gibson and starring Mark Wahlberg, starts falling apart almost as soon as it gets started. Photo: Lionsgate

Mark Wahlberg is calling his character in Flight Risk the first bad guy he’s played since Fear, that memorable 1996 cult classic in which he fingerbanged a babyfaced Reese Witherspoon on a rollercoaster before stalking and menacing her family. While I have no reason to doubt this claim, it feels spiritually untrue. Wahlberg’s foremost quality as an actor, aside from his underutilized talent for playing sweet-natured fools, is a villainous edge that he can barely suppress in his other roles. There’s a calculative core to the man that makes it seem like whoever he’s playing was once bad, and quite possibly will go on to be bad in the future, even if in the moment he’s the hero. Wahlberg is a natural antagonist who has somehow instead convinced Hollywood to brand him as a wholesome leading man, and the unnamed assassin he plays in Flight Risk is the best part of the whole misbegotten production, though that’s not saying much.

Wahlberg plays “Daryl Booth” in the film, whichis not the character’s real name. He’s actually a killer passing himself off as the charter pilot hired to fly US Marshall Madelyn Harris (Michelle Dockery) and her prisoner, mob accountant turned informant Winston (Topher Grace), over the Alaskan Alps to Anchorage. Daryl wears a backwards baseball cap and speaks in a folksy twang, and even before Winston spots the discarded pilot license featuring a picture of a guy who’s definitely not the one flying their plane, Madelyn senses that something’s off. Maybe it’s the cut on Daryl’s neck, or the way that he knows their next stop is Seattle without needing to be told. But I’d like to think that what gives the game away is the extremely nostril-forward performance Wahlberg gives. Even before he drops the accent and is shown in the ensuing scuffle to be balding underneath his hat, a reveal that’s presented as a character flaw, Daryl leads with his upturned, soon-to-be-bloodied schnoz. Once the character goes full psychopath, Wahlberg is all nose hole, snorting and snarling like a bull preparing to charge.

Flight Risk was directed by Mel Gibson, a name that in combination with Wahlberg’s might have you wondering if the movie is one of those crypto-conservative projects that rattle around with lower level releases. But it’d be more accurately described as a for-hire affair that started with the script, by Jared Rosenberg. Like a lot of Black List projects, Flight Risk is high concept in nature and made for an elevator pitch, taking place almost entirely in Daryl’s Cessna during the 90-minute flight. But the screenplay is such inept trash that it’s hard to believe that anyone would bet on it, even if its limited setting makes it a relatively thrifty affair for a thriller. Taking place in something close to real time, the movie struggles to keep taut over the long stretches when Daryl has been subdued in the back and Madelyn has to figure out how to fly the plane.

While Grace, in a variation on his usual chatty dweebs, wavers between sardonic and panicky, poor Dockery is stuck playing a character who has to make terrible decision after terrible decision in order to sustain the primary gimmick. Madelyn doesn’t immediately shoot Daryl because she wants to prove she’s not like him, though she doesn’t hesitate to kill someone else later. She wrestles a knife away from Daryl, then forgets about it. On what’s basically a whim, she accuses her boss of being the leak who let the mob in on their office’s plans. Most maddening of all, Madelyn has to spend outrageously long stretches either not checking on the unstable assassin in the back of the plane or not looking forward through the windshield at where the plane is going, depending on which the script needs her to do in order to come up with an action sequence.

Flight Risk is a dumb movie, which is not its primary sin. The problem is that it’s not the right kind of dumb — the kind where everyone involved is committed to the innate silliness of what they’re doing. Flight Risk manages to waste the gifts of Mel Gibson, who, all anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism, beliefs in the cancer-curing powers of Ivermectin, and other personal toxicities aside, is an all-time great director of violence. Though it takes place over stunning mountain ranges, Flight Risk never looks better than in its opening sequence, when Winston is hiding out in a shitty, snow-blanketed motel until Madelyn and some colleagues come busting in. Kept to the confines of a small aircraft, Gibson seems bored, unable to make something dynamic out of the brief bursts of brutality that punctuate the talky stretches — though he does get in some late gnarliness involving an escape from a pair of handcuffs. But Flight Risk doesn’t ramp up to a climax so much as it ends on an ellipsis, like someone telling a joke, getting no laughs, and deciding to pretend they weren’t trying to be funny in the first place. It’s a mess of a movie, and no amount of threatening huffing and puffing on Wahlberg’s part can make it worthwhile.