Review: Flight Risk (2025)
What’s always separated Mel Gibson from his 80s superstar peers is his penchant for making unparalleled art out of potentially career-ending gambles. He’s the guy who puts up his entire fortune to finance a Jesus movie that no studio would touch, receives a windfall when it grosses more than a Marvel blockbuster, and then follows it up with a film about Ancient Mayans featuring all the dialogue in a dead language. But with his latest directorial effort, Flight Risk, Gibson takes his greatest chance so far: setting an action movie almost entirely in a single-prop plane. And, he totally pulls it off with a nonchalant seamlessness that only the blindest of wokescolds could deny.
Deviating from Gibson’s typical great men terrain, Flight Risk follows a disgraced U.S. Marshal (Downton Abby’s Michelle Dockery) as she escorts a mob accountant (That 70s Show’s Topher Grace) from his hideout in the Alaskan wilderness to testify against his boss. But when Mark Wahlberg’s roughneck pilot trades up his aw-shucks platitudes for deranged hitman psychopathy, she’s forced to keep the plane in the air and protect her charge as they hover above the tundra.
Though its scathing reviews dismiss it as a by-the-numbers action flick, Flight Risk shows that Gibson remains one of Hollywood’s finest directors. Every impeccably framed shot works in the service of creating a sense of volatility and unbroken tension, an effect Gibson intensifies by playing his actors against type. The internet may be in a tizzy over “Baldberg” and his appetite for unhinged delivery, but the movie’s most impressive performances belong to Dockery and Grace, who take the snarky, above-it-all personas that made them TV famous and imbue them with a vulnerability that separates Flight Risk from its rote genre counterparts.
Like all of Gibson’s work behind the camera, the film is a story about grasping at redemption through a cycle of failures. However, his heroes are no longer figures who define themselves through history’s greatest battles ala William Wallace, The King of Kings, and Hacksaw Ridge’s Desmond Doss. They are the put-upon middlemen who finally learn to push back against the mediocre powers that be whose corrupt entrenchment allowed them to orchestrate this situation. Flight Risk is the first movie of MAGA’s second act, and, for the first time, Gibson seems to think there’s something ahead besides pressing on in the face of defeat.
Flight Risk is now playing in theaters.