The Reel Review
A U.S. Marshal transporting a fugitive informant across Alaska by airplane must use her wits to keep them alive when she discovers her pilot has been replaced by a hired killer. Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale), Mark Wahlberg and Topher Grace (That ’70s Show) star in this crime thriller from actor/director Mel Gibson.
The controversial Oscar-winner’s first directorial effort in a decade is a boring made-for-TV movie that sadly fails to take flight. Wahlberg’s distracting shaved head (to appear bald), a ridiculously rickety crop duster type plane (do the U.S. Marshals hate this agent?), some atrociously bad dialogue and Grace’s distracting, sitcom-like delivery bog down Dockery’s well-intended efforts to salvage this very predictable, clichéd clunker. Leah Remini has a cameo voice role as one of the marshal’s associates.
If the ho-hum screenplay isn’t bad enough, there also are a planeload of factual errors in Flight Risk, from auto pilots that mysteriously change course, the plane’s plowing through a mountaintop snowbank that certainly would have ripped off its wings and a highly improbable, totally bonkers landing. If you want to see Dockery kicking ass on a plane, instead watch 2014’s far superior and way more entertaining Non-Stop.
REEL FACTS
• Mel Gibson was blacklisted in Hollywood for many years following a litany of homophobic, anti-semitic and racist remarks, until his Oscar-nominated 2016 war drama Hacksaw Ridge resulted in a thaw in his bad reputation.
• It was Mark Wahlberg’s idea to have his character be bald, with filmmakers later acknowledging his appearance as being reminiscent of BTK killer Dennis Rader.
• The final sequence was filmed at the small one-runway airport in Mesquite, Nevada. The two big Xs seen in the film on either side of the runway were to let real-life pilots in the area know that the runway was closed during filming.
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