Mel Gibson's New Action Flick With 29% on RT Is One of the Biggest Flops of the Year
Even an A-list cast can't save this disaster of a movie.
Mel Gibson's career has been in turmoil for over a decade due to cancellations. But time seems to heal public wounds – Hacksaw Ridge has been hailed as Gibson's grand return to Hollywood.
We thought we were in for some spectacular achievements, but somehow the director made a B-movie thriller with a nod to 90s action movies called Flight Risk.
What Is Flight Risk About?
Marshal Madolyn Harris arrests accountant Winston while he is hiding in a remote part of Alaska. Winston is an informant needed in court to testify against Moretti, a criminal Winston used to work for.
Madolyn charters a private jet to get to Anchorage and then to New York. Instead of a real pilot, Daryl, a Texas psychopath and killer, is at the controls, with his own sadistic goals for the flight and his two companions.
Flight Risk Failed to Become an Air Action Movie Like Air Force One
It's possible that something happened to Flight Risk during production. The writers' efforts are more or less clear – they were aiming for the air action movie genre of the '90s, like Air Force One and Con Air, but the movie can't even get off the ground.
Topher Grace's hysterical character, Michelle Dockery's nondescript marshal, and ridiculous scuffles with Mark Wahlberg's villain. For most of the movie, the handcuffed psychopath sits in the wing of the plane, sometimes joking maliciously, sometimes trying to free himself.
Flight Risk Is Too Absurd and Illogical
A dubious pilot of the plane and his unclear goals, characters who are unable to land the transport on their own, unfriendly terrain of Alaska – where the viewer can be carried away by suspense, Flight Risk overwhelms with first-rate absurdity.
The trio fights on board and leaves the steering wheel without a pilot, does not hesitate to fire a gun right in the plane, and the dispatcher, instead of helping, offers the woman to go on a date with him.
The main problem of the movie is not even the comedy, but the unbearable falsity of the events. The viewer does not see exciting shots from above, and all the tricks with the plane are spoiled by cheap graphics – for 2025, thrillers with such an approach are considered a creative crime.
Flight Risk Is One of Mel Gibson's Biggest Directorial Failures
To what extent Gibson himself is to blame for this failure is an open question, but the direction in Flight Risk is unusually faceless and devoid of the author's style.
Even Mel Gibson's last name is thrown into the credits – literally everything was done to hide the traces of the director's presence.