Flight Risk
15 | ★★✩✩✩
Reviewed by John Nathan
There are more plot holes in this thriller directed by Mel Gibson than one can be bothered to count. Michelle Dockery is Madolyn, a US marshal assigned to bring a mafia accountant to justice from his hideout in Alaska.
To do this a plane has been chartered. However the pilot of the little propeller-driven aircraft is a psychopathic, sadistic hitman played by a supremely unlikeable Mark Wahlberg.
The film’s USP is that it is set almost entirely in the cabin of an aircraft as it flies over the bleak and beautiful Alaskan mountains. It generates plenty of tension. However, clunky one-liners in Jared Rosenberg’s script – most of them given to the nerdy, nervous accountant (Tophy Grace) – hamper the suspension of disbelief.
So does the nagging question as to why Madolyn’s corrupt boss in her agency does not kill the pilot whose job is to talk her down. That he does so while coming on to her is itself another whole bowl of wrong, a dish not unfamiliar to a director remembered as much for his antisemitic comments as his films.
