Reviews For The Easily Distracted: Flight Risk

Title: Flight Risk

Describe This Movie In One Blazing Saddles Quote:

HEDLEY LAMARR: You said "rape" twice.APPLICANT: I like rape.

Brief Plot Synopsis: Pete Hesgeth's new favorite movie.

Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: One George Kennedy out of five.

Tagline: "Feel it in."

Better Tagline: "Seriously?"

Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: Winston (Topher Grace) is an unwilling witness for the prosecution against a notorious crime boss. Tasked with bringing him in is U.S. Marshal Madolyn Harris (Michelle Dockery), who enlists pilot Daryl Booth (Mark Wahlberg) to fly them out of the Alaska wilderness. Problem is, Booth is not really Booth, and he's been hired by said crime boss to take out Winston and Harris. Worse, Harris has to contend with possible betrayals on the ground as well. "Critical" Analysis: You won't see Mel Gibson's name on the promos for Flight Risk, his sixth directorial feature. The movie is billed as from "the acclaimed director of Braveheart, Apocalypto, and Hacksaw Ridge," so it's not exactly a Zodiac letter level of difficulty to figure it out. It's just funny that Lionsgate acknowledges the visceral reaction many people have to the name "Mel Gibson."

Wahlberg, on the other hand, has no apparent compunction about working with the once disgraced director. The two have starred twice together (Daddy's Home 2 and Father Stu), with Gibson playing his dad both times. There's a joke to be made here about Catholicism and paternal issues but laughing off anti-Semitism and violence against women doesn't seem so funny now, for some reason.

I bring up the latter because it — or the threat of same — is one of the key through points of Flight Risk. Simply killing both Winston and Harris isn't enough for "Booth"; he has to repeatedly threaten how much "fun" he's going to have with both of them before he does them in. Jared Rosenberg's script initially attempts to laugh this off, as Winston laments how much worse it would be to be raped by "a bald guy."

But it's not a few threats against Winston and Harris, it's the *constant* jokes Daryl makes about it, to say nothing of the Marshal on the ground trying to give Harris piloting advice while repeatedly hitting on her over the satellite phone. Gibson also said that Wahlberg improvised much of his rapey dialogue, and sounded impressed that he did. This isn't exactly the ringing endorsement the guy who once suggested that the mother of his own child should be sexually assaulted thinks it is.

Worse, there's no point in keeping Booth alive. He has no intention of helping them land the plane, and — again — there are the unending rape jokes. At the very least, Harris should have shot him when they were low enough that depressurization wasn't a problem.

Dockery and Grace are better than they have any right to be in this, but their back and forth and the federal betrayal subplot would be better served if not constantly interrupted by Mark "Baldberg."

And that's the other thing. This is, by my count, Wahlberg's first pure villain role since Fear, and apparently the best signifier that he's a bad guy is lack of hair. Perhaps Gibson's insecurity over his own (alleged) follicular transplant convinced him the only way audiences would believe the guy who could've prevented 9/11 as a bad guy would be make him bald.

The sole remaining charitable component of my being wants to say first-time screenwriter Rosenberg wrote a taut, betrayal-themed thriller set in an airplane that ended up getting hijacked (heh) by the weird sensibilities of its director and co-star. But who knows? Lie down with dogs, and all that.

In any other climate, Flight Risk would have "enjoyed" a streaming release and dropped out of sight after a week or two. That it's actually going to be in theaters is less an endorsement of the mystical power of the moviegoing experience than it is further normalization of misogyny and the minimization of sexual assault in our current climate.

Flight Risk is in theaters today. Unfortunately.