‘Flight Risk’ Review: Mark Wahlberg Gives His Wildest Performance in Mel Gibson’s Airborne Chamber Play

Gibson's latest concoction imagines what "Top Gun: Maverick" might have looked like if the planes were barely functional and nobody knew how to fly them.

Hollywood history is littered with action films that begin as promising elevator pitches but ultimately devolve into forgettable slop by veering too far from their premises. Plenty of clever hooks have been squandered by messy second and third acts that felt the need to increase stakes and spectacle but ended up losing touch with the situation that piqued our interest in the first place. “Flight Risk” is no such film. Possibly the most January movie ever conceived, Mel Gibson‘s latest directorial outing has always been bluntly honest about its value proposition for discerning moviegoers. You get to see a bald Mark Wahlberg impersonate a pilot to hijack a plane, forcing its two other passengers to fight him while simultaneously trying to figure out how to fly it in real time.

If that doesn’t sound exciting, you can just stop reading and feel confident in your decision to skip “Flight Risk.” Any concerns that there might be more to this film than meets the eye are unfounded. But if you’re at all intrigued by that hook, you’re in for a piece of popcorn escapism that commits to its gimmicky premise so thoroughly that it’s hard to imagine anyone who willingly buys a ticket leaving with anything less than a massive smile on their face. CinemaScore might need to add a grade higher than A+ to accommodate this one.

Deputy U.S. Marshall Madolyn Harris is a woman on a mission. She’s closing in on one of her white whales, an organized crime boss who has long evaded prosecution. Her quest to find a witness to testify against him takes her to a remote cabin in the Alaskan wilderness, where she arrests his sleazy accountant Winston (Topher Grace). A weasel with little on his mind except self-preservation and enrichment, Winston is barely in handcuffs for ten seconds before he offers to flip on his boss.

Transporting such a high profile witness requires a private plane, but the Alaskan woods are not exactly swimming in charter jets. The first step is to get Winston back to a city with a major airport, so Madolyn enlists local pilot Daryl Booth (Mark Wahlberg) to handle the 90-minute flight to Anchorage. Booth’s crappy plane is used for little more than crop dusting and the occasional sightseeing trip for fisherman visiting the area, but it has two empty seats and is available to take off immediately.

Daryl is a chatty good old boy who is eager to make conversation with Madolyn, but the U.S. Marshall is a little preoccupied. This is her first job back in the field after years of being stuck behind a desk after she botched the job of protecting her last testifying witness. Getting Winston to court safely is paramount to her case, and her entire career is resting on her ability not to repeat old mistakes.

While she doesn’t fall into the same traps that plagued her last job, she ends up in a new one that anyone could be forgiven for failing to anticipate. As her pilot bemoans the fact that his GPS and radio systems are failing, she begins to notice inconsistencies in his behavior that send up red flags. When she spots a pilot’s license on the floor, one thing becomes clear: this plane belongs to a man named Daryl Booth, but he’s not the one flying it.

A confrontation reveals that “Daryl” is actually a hired hijacker intent on ensuring that Winston doesn’t survive long enough to testify. And while Madolyn has a gun, a taser, and enough hand-to-hand combat experience to temporarily restrain him, it doesn’t change the fact that he’s still the only person in the plane who knows how to land it. As she attempts to get in contact with the ground and secure the situation while ignoring his onslaught of lewd homosexual remarks, she’s forced to consider the possibility that such an infiltration would only be possible if someone from her own department was a mole who leaked her plans to the enemy. With an hour left in her flight, she has to figure out how to make it to the ground alive while simultaneously ensuring that the people greeting her aren’t out to get her.

With a backdrop that consists of a rickety tin can hurtling through turbulent mountain air, “Flight Risk” can sometimes feel like an alternate version of the “Top Gun: Maverick” climax in which the planes were barely functional and nobody knew how to fly them. But while it would have been all too easy to saturate the film with shaky camera work and stomach-dropping dips, Gibson demonstrates a respectable restraint when it comes to in-air spectacle. He goes all in on a few key moments that will likely nauseate anyone lucky enough to attend a 4DX screening, but the film prioritizes human drama over aerial thrills at every turn.

Jared Rosenberg’s script would have worked almost as well as a stage play, as its real brilliance lies in its ability to generate endless amount of conflict by trapping three people who are uniquely qualified to grate on each other’s nerves in a room together. The fact that said room is flying, unmanned, and rapidly running out of fuel is just an added bonus. Winston’s endless complaints and insatiable need to fill silences with the sound of his own voice turn him into a perfect scene agitator that makes every single task feel exponentially harder for Madolyn. Ditto for Daryl, whose ravenous sexual depravity and genuine lack of concern about whether he lives or dies turns him into an impossible wild card. It’s certainly the horniest performance Wahlberg has given since “Boogie Nights” — and it could even be argued that this one is hornier, given that nobody is paying Daryl to behave like this.

Grace and Wahlberg are both brilliant in their own ways, but the two of them together could quickly fly off the rails were it not for Dockery providing the perfect neutralizing force. Madolyn intelligent enough to think through every new challenge without losing her cool, never succumbing to a bad decision just to expedite a new twist in the script. Dockery inspires so much confidence that it’s easy to buy into a story that ultimately revolves around one character thinking to herself and unravelling a conspiracy in real time. From its tight script and emphasis on character to Gibson’s surprisingly muted directing, the entirety of “Flight Risk” feels like a testament to the enduring value of simply following the fundamentals of narrative storytelling to a T.

The theme of isolation is top of mind when thinking about “Flight Risk” — both in terms of the film’s wise choice to contain all of the action to a plane, and the compartmentalization that might be required of moviegoers who try to isolate the film from the controversial personal life of its director and enjoy it on its own terms. The question of whether that’s even possible is a personal decision with no simple answers. But when evaluated as a work of pure craftsmanship, “Flight Risk” is some of the finest stupidity Hollywood has gifted us in a long time.

Grade: B+

A Lionsgate release, “Flight Risk” opens in theaters on Friday, January 24.

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