The Reel Review
A mercenary is forced to team up with the high-value asset he’s tracking on an international flight after he realizes the plane is filled with assassins trying to kill them both. Josh Hartnett, Charithra Chandran (Bridgerton), Katie Sackhoff (Battlestar Galactica) and Marko Zaror (John Wick: Chapter 4) star in this action/comedy.
With a story substituting a plane for a train and lifted straight from 2022’s Bullet Train, the incredibly brainless Fight or Flight takes the craptasticness of the prior film one step further with even more blood-splattered awfulness. Never mind that the silly story makes absolutely no sense – it is just an excuse for director James Madigan to hobble one chaotic fight scene with the next. There are lots of broken bones in the heavily choreographed, martial arts filled battles and thanks to the appearance of a chainsaw in the third act, a lot of severed body parts and heaps of blood.
Hartnett has a certain manic gleefulness, that, like the nonstop carnage and bickering amongst the flight attendants, grows tiresome after about 30 minutes. Chandran is the lone saving grace as the flight attendant with a secret, but even her performance is lost in all the mindlessness. As moronic as this film is, it does feature creative uses of airplane seatbelts and armrests as weapons of death, so there’s that.
REEL FACTS
• Josh Hartnett took a break from doing movies during the 2010s, enjoying a resurgence in 2023’s Oppenheimer and 2024’s Trap. He and his wife live with their four young children southeast of London. His next film will be the May 2026 psychological romantic thriller Verity, co-starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson.
• Scotland-born Charithra Chandran is best known for her roles in the Amazon spy thriller series Alex Rider and season two of Bridgerton.
• Katee Sackhoff gained fame as Lt. Starbuck on the 2004 series remake of Battlestar Galactica, and more recently as Bo-Katan Kryze in The Mandalorian and Victoria Moretti in 2019’s Longmire.
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