Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg Fly Off the Handle in Flight Risk

There’s always been a masochistic streak running through the work of Mel Gibson. It was there well before his movie’s bursts of torture and/or self-sacrificed bodies took on the darker hue of a man with genuinely disturbing rage and bigotry issues, rather than simply another movie star with a mild messiah complex. And it’s been especially obvious in his limited but memorable output as a director, where gore lines and leads the bloody passage to salvation: William Wallace, Jesus Christ, the mutilated soldier bodies of Hacksaw Ridge, and so on.
Gibson’s new film Flight Risk has no such anguish, at least not on paper. It’s a January programmer with pleasingly compact Hitchcockian parameters: U.S. Marshal Madelyn Harris (Michelle Dockery) must escort mob accountant Winston (Topher Grace), a (reluctantly) cooperating witness against his boss, from remote Alaska, and most of the film takes place within the tiny, rickety plane chartered for that purpose. It quickly – well, semi-quickly – becomes clear that their chatty pilot (Mark Wahlberg) is not actually a folksy Alaskan called Daryl Booth, but a hitman assigned to take Winston and Madelyn out (after apparently entertaining himself with some character and wig work). For him to do his job, his passengers need to die. For them to survive, someone needs to fly the plane, on top of which the hardened cop and the panicked crook need to trust each other. It’s an elegantly ridiculous, movie-perfect series of dilemmas.
It also introduces a heretofore unseen challenge to Gibson as a director: Just be normal. Guide your actors, wring the suspense, and land the plane somehow, whether bumpy, rough, or disastrous. Control yourself. Maybe do your best imitation of a normal movie this time.
Gibson can’t bring himself to do it. It’s tempting to offer this inability as proof of his auteur status, and on some level, it probably is that. After all, were M. Night Shyamalan to make a movie from this same premise – it’s exactly the kind of limited-location high concept he’s thrived on for the past decade – it would be foolhardy to expect something anonymously proficient. There would be oddball digressions, peculiar alien phrasings to the dialogue, and an earnest dedication to hokum and cornball charm – like the cheerfully flirty on-the-ground pilot who pops onto Madelyn’s radio to help guide her through the process of flying a plane across the wilds of Alaska.
So yes, Gibson and the screenplay by Jared Rosenberg deliver the types of moments that will feel familiar to Shyamalan fans. It could be a good fit; Gibson and Wahlberg have both worked with Shyamalan, giving career-best and memorably career-worst performances, respectively. (Either way, learning experiences.) What’s missing here is Shyamalan’s craft, and not just his knack for framing and blocking – though there is that, especially noticeable in scenes where more elaborate camerawork fudging would be required to communicate how and why characters don’t notice each other’s feverish attempts to escape unfolding mere feet away. Moreover, much of Flight Risk has a janky, cheap look and awkward dialogue, all of which Gibson seems to mistake for what-the-hell wackiness; hence, I guess, the baffling opening scene where Winston is apprehended, complete with Grace wisecracks about a gross motel comforter, the first of several jokes characters make about soiling themselves, and the appearance of a CG moose.
Grace features more heavily in the movie than the trailers indicated, possibly because he is giving the only well-judged performance in it. He reverts to TV-level shtick, to be sure, playing Winston as a buddy-comedy-ready nervous-coward motormouth, but at least a few of his remarks land, as does (however ham-fistedly) his sudden sense of regret over a wasted life of crime. There’s an easy professionalism to his presence, which Dockery labors to match by pulling unconvincing tough-gal faces. Any bad acting on her part, though, is handily upstaged by Wahlberg, clearly relishing the opportunity to play a full-on villain for the first time in decades, though not doing it especially well. The best performance in the movie may be Wahlberg’s genuinely shaved-down hairline, which does an amazing impression of a bald cap.
Wahlberg seems to be on the same page as Gibson in terms of what constitutes true evil: Making lip-smacking intimations of homosexuality (he keeps calling Winston “Twiggy”) in between “colorful” threats of gruesome violence. To be fair (?), the hitman threatens Madelyn with rape, too. Boy, this guy … he doesn’t care who he offends! Wahlberg’s character seems to enjoy whipping himself into a frenzy of violent rage, shot in such loving close-ups that you start to wonder if this is really what gets Gibson off: Getting his fellow Catholic to unleash the nonsensical fire and brimstone that might look more untoward coming from the director himself. There certainly isn’t a dramatically viable reason to have Wahlberg constantly flying off the handle; if anything, all of the show-off frothing undermines the character’s more conniving side, and at times feels like a howl of abandon, lamenting the movie’s restrictions, longing to go feral instead.
In fact, the strangest thing about the hitman character may be how little he ultimately seems to matter. In a normal movie, a big star hamming it up as the bad guy would serve as a red herring that strengthens the “real” heart of the story, the unexpected bond between Madelyn or Winston, or maybe a struggle within Madelyn herself. In Flight Risk, it’s just more shoddy indifference; the movie indulges Wahlberg’s crazed overacting, goads him into a frenzy, and then bafflingly shrugs him off for an anti-payoff that would be funny if it weren’t so stupid. (OK, credit due: It is a little funny.) A few stomach-dropping moments of suspense feel increasingly tossed-off as the movie zooms toward its overblown yet low-tension climax. By the end, it’s less clear than ever why Gibson wanted to make a nifty little genre picture – or, if he did, why he declined to actually make it. Flight Risk feels like a free-floating outlet for a little bit of rage and a little bit of shtick, both Mad Mel standbys that he seems unwilling to really examine, within these confines or elsewhere.
Director: Mel Gibson
Writer: Jared Rosenberg
Starring: Michelle Dockery, Mark Wahlberg, Topher Grace
Release Date: January 24, 2025
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.