Mel Gibson’s Thriller Is Your Typical January Movie

“Flight Risk” is a modest affair. It sports a downright frugal budget of $25 million, and is set almost entirely on board a small prop plane. There are only three on-screen actors for the bulk of the movie’s mercifully brisk 91-minute runtime, and the concept is easy to get one’s head around. In execution, it feels like a neophyte director’s confident first turn. Perhaps shabby, but well-meaning, and only occasionally straining against its obviously limited means. 

Only this isn’t a first-time director’s film. This is a film by Mel Gibson, the once-respected Oscar darling and hitmaker, now ostracized for his many offensive public outbursts and unhealthy personal viewpoints. Gibson, as a director, has overseen multiple weighty, violent historical pictures, many of them impressively staged and visually astounding. This was the man who upped the game of the Hollywood epic with “Braveheart,” and turned Jesus’ last few days into a brutal “Terrifier”-esque gore reel with “The Passion of the Christ.” One might find his films to be assertively masculine, a little assertively Christian, or perhaps slickly melodramatic, but they never lacked ambition. Two of his films were staged in ancient languages. 

With “Flight Risk,” Gibson’s flagging career has pushed him back down into the practical and modest. In 2016, it seems that Academy voters were halfway willing to accept him back into the room by nominating his wartime film “Hacksaw Ridge” for six Oscars (it won two), but whatever goodwill he accrued, Gibson immediately flung away to find comfort in the arms of dunderhead right wing shock jocks. Most recently, Gibson was declared to be some kind of Hollywood Ambassador for the Trump administration, although the specifics of his mission remain unclear. 

“Flight Risk,” however, may be the director’s last call for level-headed diplomacy. It’s a simple thriller with a slight politic and no heavy-handed moral. It’s not epic or preachy. It’s a light, simple Saturday matinee. 

The premise of “Flight Risk” is so efficient, and was so clearly designed to be made on the cheap, it would make Roger Corman or Jason Blum perk up. Michelle Dockery played a hardworking U.S. Marshal named Harris who is tasked with transporting a mob accountant named Walter (Topher Grace) from his off-the-grid Alaska hideout to the big city. She aims to have his testify against a mafia don. Harris’ only means of transporting Walter is a small, rickety, privately hired plane, flown by a colorful local pilot named Daryl (Gibson’s “Daddy’s Home 2” and “Father Stu” co-star Mark Wahlberg). The bulk of the film will take place on that plane. The film will end with it … well, I won’t spoil if it lands, crashes, or does a secret third thing. 

It seems, however, that Daryl is not what he seems. Early in the flight, Walter and Harris find that Daryl is, in fact, a brutal, foul-mouthed assassin with a penchant for torture. He killed and replaced the original pilot, and is how flying his charges to God-knows-where to murder them both in a creative fashion. Why not kill them both immediately? Because Daryl likes to take him time; when Harris learns of Daryl’s previous crimes, there are references to slowly poked-out eyeballs and the like. 

Wahlberg isn’t quite right as a vicious serial killer. He’s meant to be menacing and sinister, but comes across as no worse than a particularly nasty lager lout one might encounter at a Bostonian pub. Because he lacks a vital sense of Hannibal Lecter-like terror, the film never emerges as wholly threatening. It feels more like a problem-solving exercise than a thriller. 

Walter, the script (by Jared Rosenberg) assures us, is a funny, nervous-energy-filled chatterbox, but Grace seems far too laid back and affable in the role for his character’s anxious traits to emerge. Like Wahlberg, he doesn’t bring the right kind of rising energy to his role, happy to stay in the realm of “genial.” Both characters seem like they escaped from a more adult thriller because they weren’t comfortable going to edgier extremes.

Faring far better than Wahlberg or Grace — indeed, carrying the film on her back — is Dockery, who affects an action hero’s steely resolve, coming across as clear-headed and eager to solve extreme problems. She reads like a Starfleet officer, a capable troubleshooter who is never quite out of ideas. When she loses her cool, it’s not a moment of temporary madness, but perhaps a considered moment of steadfastness. It’s okay, she seems to figure, to pummel Daryl in the face at this moment.

After the initial first-act plot twist (revealed in the film’s trailers), “Flight Risk” has no further surprises for the audience. The tension doesn’t so much mount and gently crest. Gibson doesn’t bring any sense of verve or style to “Flight Risk” that couldn’t have been brought by any other halfway capable director. It’s matter-of-fact, straightforward, and plain. Plain on a plane. It feels like it was intended for casual cable TV consumption, recommended after one finished watching three or four episodes of “Law & Order.” Or, more fittingly, it feels like a January movie. Even if it had come out in July, “Flight Risk” would be a January movie.

“Flight Risk” perfectly serviceable, completely innocuous entertainment. It’s fine. It’s meh. 

This is a baffling turnout, however, for such a hotly contested and typically ambitious filmmaker like Gibson. Of course, no film exists without a politic — all art is political — but the filmmaker seems determined to be as neutral as possible with this low-budget thriller. He’s making no statements, fleeing from any notion that he might be proselytizing. “Flight Risk” is as substantive as an airport novel, as nutritious as a marshmallow. 

Which, a more cynical viewer might suspect, is a calculation on Gibson’s part. He may sense that his politics and his … controversies … will drive audiences away, so he must be on his best behavior. Can he make a film for only $25 million dollars? Yes. Can he tell a story efficiently? Yes. Are the actors good? They avail themselves. It is taut and stylish and unique? Not at all. There’s nothing to be offended by in “Flight Risk,” seemingly by design. There’s also nothing to be exhilarated by in “Flight Risk,” floating lightly down to the middle of the road.

But no film is released into a vacuum. Some may stay away from “Flight Risk” because of Gibson’s off-screen shenanigans, and that’s their right. Some can only compartmentalize so hard. It’s certainly a bout of bad timing that Gibson just became a Trump ambassador right when his film hit theaters. It will be hard to watch “Flight Risk” without thinking of what the director intends to do in Hollywood in the year 2025.

Beyond that, the film is only okay. 

/Film rating: 5 out of 10

“Flight Risk” is in theaters now.