Full spoilers incoming!

A “fuck you, it’s January” release, Flight Risk follows three people - an FBI agent, an informant and a pilot as they leave from a small Alaskan town en route to Seattle by way of Anchorage. Winston (Topher Grace) is a wisecracking money man for the mob, and now he’s on his way to testify against his old boss, Moretti. Bringing him in is Madolyn Harris (Michelle Dockery), a disgraced FBI agent who is on her first job back in the field. Finally, there’s the backwoods pilot named Daryl (Mark Wahlberg).

Now, if you’ve seen any of the marketing for this, it spoils the first real “twist”, which is that the pilot isn’t who he says he is - he’s an assassin for the mob. This is revealed pretty early on to the audience and the passengers, and once that’s out of the bag, it’s a “how are they going to land this plane if the pilot is incapacitated” and “who can I trust” kind of movie. It’s like the last five minutes of Turbulance, but stretched out for over an hour.

There’s a lot to say about this movie but overall I thought it was a failure on so many levels, all starting with the script. I was shocked to find out that this was a part of the 2020 Blacklist, so obviously I thought that extensive rewrites had to have taken place in order to make the flick this bad, but no…the script is actually worse than the film. In theory, the set up is a good one until you start to think logistically. If Winston is an uber-important witness, wouldn’t they send their own U.S. Marshall’s plane to Alaska to get him? And wouldn’t they have more than one agent watching him, considering he’s an obvious flight risk? Wouldn’t Madolyn have vetted the pilot and understood what he looked like?

Getting past how absurd that actually is, the script has a complete lack of tension and it could have been so easily fixed. Take Winston, for example. In the opening scene (which has a CGI motel in the opening shot - how easy would it have been to just point a camera at an actual motel?), Winston asks for a deal. They should have dragged that whole thing out. Once they’re in the plane, Winston should have been the wildcard. You’ve got the FBI agent and the hitman, and he should have been playing both for the best deal. At the very least, there should have been a reason that Winston needed to be kept alive. Maybe he had a large amount of money stored somewhere that only he knew about and Moretti needed him alive. As it stands, the hitman should have just killed them both the minute they got into the air. And if you really wanted to shock the audience, play against the audience expectations. Even if you hadn’t seen the marketing, the minute Wahlberg opens his mouth you have to be thinking, “He’s a bad guy.” “Ya’ll need a pilot?” Just have Wahlberg appear to play the same kind of character he ALWAYS plays because he hasn’t played a villain role since the late 90’s and then have him turn over the villain card.

At its core, take Flight Risk as a cautionary tale about people doing their jobs poorly. Everyone in this film with the exception of Hasan is terrible at what they do. Winston is terrible at being a mob money man because he’s on the run and couldn’t even successfully hide out in the middle of nowhere. Madolyn is terrible at her job for several reasons. Once she incapacitates the pilot, she needs to figure out how to fly the plane. She tries on the plane radio for a bit and comes up fairly empty, and Winston says, “He’ll call it in, right?” Madolyn’s face lights up - “Call it in!” Turns out she’s got a satellite phone that she just neglected to remember. She also incapacitates Daryl 3 or 4 times and he just keeps getting out of her traps. She should have shot him the second time he got free and tried to kill her, but for the plot she keeps him there on the floor of the plane. She also makes the worst decisions in multiple scenarios, including calling out the US Marshall Service director on the phone when she finds out he’s the mole instead of keeping that card in her pocket, putting her at risk when she lands. Finally, Daryl. A hitman who, instead of killing them both immediately while in the air, tries several times unsuccessfully. He’s chatty and tries to make us think he’s real, real bad, but all he shows is that he’s a really bad hitman.

In the original script, the beginning scene at the hotel wasn’t included. Had to have been a post-test screening addition because audiences are really dumb. That scene also included a CGI moose outside of the CGI hotel that looked like it was straight out of the Lion King live action. The ending is also changed for the better - in the script, Daryl doesn’t die - he just sits there handcuffed until the credits role. There’s no additional hitman at the end of the script either, once the plane comes to a stop, they all sigh and the movie is over. Daryl’s end in the film is pretty funny, sliding out of the spiraling plane only to be smacked by an ambulance that is tailing the plane VERY closely for some reason, so I’m glad they changed that. On the other hand, the way the film ends is bewildering.

They’re getting Winston, who has been stabbed into an ambulance with absolutely NO urgency (also shout out to the medevac guy who pulls Winston off the plane by just hooking him under his arms and dragging him out exactly where he had been stabbed). When they get him into the ambulance, no one stays with him, enabling a Moretti hitman dressed like an EMT guy to jump in the back with him. By the way, how does Moretti have a person in Anchorage? How did he get to the runway that quickly with an EMT uniform? Anyway, he jumps into the back and tries to suffocate Winston, so Madolyn opens the door and shoots him in the head. Meanwhile, everyone in the back just kind of looks in casually with little to no reaction. A few firefighters just casually walk away. Remember, these people have to be thinking, “That agent just opened the doors and blew away my coworker!” Instead, they kind of peer in like they’re thinking about bidding on a dark storage unit and then the movie cuts to black.

This movie was hot garbage. I love a good contained thriller but in order for them to work, you need a compelling argument for why everyone needs to live. You need suspense, and this movie gave us none of that. If I had to highlight a few positives - I liked Topher Grace, as annoying as he was at points. He plays the smarmy asshole so well. I also thought Mark Wahlberg was funny as the over-the-top villain and the choice to shave his head was…inspired. Unfortunately, the director, Hollywood’s favorite antisemite Mel Gibson, seemed to take the material way too seriously for what it should have been. In my opinion, they should have embraced the b-movie mentality and just went full bonkers. I felt like it was headed that way when the plane impossibly slams into a pile of snow on a mountain and just keeps flying with no issues. It felt like Wahlberg and Grace understood the assignment. It also gives me hope that, if this was one of the Blacklist finalists, that mine may someday be on that same docket.

Flight Risk.

The Gorge (2025).