Fight or Flight Takes Us for a Crazy B-Movie Ride Before It Runs Out of Fuel

You wonder how far into the development process the filmmakers behind Fight or Flight were before they came up with the bluntly amusing title for their aeroplane-set assassin brawler–there’s a nonzero chance that the so-obvious-it’s-brilliant pun title was instrumental in getting the movie financed. Like many of the best B-movies, Fight or Flight is a proudly unoriginal work of entertainment, owing its heightened premise and ironic tone to the waves of John Wick and David Leitch copycats that cast stunt performers as hired killers for a couple lone antiheroes to battle for 90 bone-crunching minutes. But up till now, none of those Parabellum and Bullet Train wannabes starred Josh Hartnett as a merc with a shocking blond dye job having a nervous breakdown on a swanky passenger jet. Along with the punny title, that’s at least two things in Fight or Flight’s favor before the film even starts.

Lucas Reyes (Hartnett) is ex-Secret Service, now washed up and perennially wasted far from American shores, where he has serious beef with senior intelligence hombres. He’s pulled out of his Thailand purgatory by a former handler Katherine Brunt (Katee Sackhoff), instructing him to board a long-haul flight to protect a dangerous but valuable asset dubbed “The Ghost,” a black hat hacker with a righteous mission and endless resources. Lucas boards the flight not knowing what his target actually looks like, but he soon has bigger problems: There’s a bounty on The Ghost and dozens of international assassins have also booked tickets in the hopes of taking them down personally. In his search for redemption, Lucas finds himself in their way.

Unlike the directors of semi-recent brawlers like John Wick, Atomic Blonde, Day Shift or Extraction, Fight or Flight’s director James Madigan does not come from a stunt performing background. Before now, he’s been a visual effects supervisor and second unit director on a slew of genre blockbusters like Iron Man 2, the Divergent series sequels, and no fewer than three Hasbro action films. Switching to a smaller scale for his directorial debut was a wise move; Madigan makes it his mission to make his performers and visuals sizzle with pep, at least as much as the limited resources can afford. Fight or Flight has one foot in the DTV brawler genre with elastic handheld camerawork and a refreshingly unhinged treatment of assassin deathmatches, even if the film only truly delights in its escalating first hour rather than the choppy final act.

Fight or Flight whets your appetite with an in media res fight scene in economy class: fists, knives, bullets, and a random chainsaw flight through the air with reckless abandon. The choice to immediately cut back to 12 hours earlier, before any of the cool action has started, is a cheap trick to hook a wary audience – but witnessing a sliver of the danger waiting for Lucas on his flight tips us to expect the unexpected in what feels like a basic, unsophisticated premise. The story unfolds at a quick, compelling pace: There’s a chaotic urgency as Lucas gets into his first hitman tussle (with a born showman played by Marko Zaror), realizes the scale of his 35,000 feet predicament, and pulls the poor British flight attendants Isha (Charithra Chandran) and Royce (Danny Ashok) into his disorganized mission.