Writing film scripts must be hard.

A targeted witness is transported in a small plane across Alaska. The marshal in charge of his safety doesn’t check the identification on their pilot however, and some shenanigans takes place.

Flight Risk released late 2024 in the US, and early 2025 in the UK. Notedly directed by the increasingly absent Mel Gibson, starring Michelle Dockery (Boy Kills World) Topher Grace (Spider-Man 3) and Mark Wahlberg (Transformers 4 and 5) really, I could have done something else with my time.

Flight Risk feels like a film out of time. That is to say, this sort of movie might have flown higher in the 1990s than in 2025. Audiences are generally smarter (or perhaps more cynical) when consuming plot. Maybe that’s a defence for the writer of this film, Jared Rosenberg, with this being is sole writing credit on IMDB. Because this is bad. Very bad.

The film starts out with Topher Grace’s character, Winston, being pounced upon by officers keen to arrest him. Leading them is Dockery’s fiercely “by-the-book” Madolyn. Some dialogue about pissing later, we cut to them boarding their tiny plane. Joining them is Daryl (Wahlberg) as their pilot. Unfortunately, only after they take off, they realize Daryl isn’t all he says he is.

You know when you have a technician from a company to fix something in your house, you ask for identification? To prove they aren’t going to murder you horribly? You’d think Madolyn would check Daryl’s ID. The ID that Winston finds in the plane mere moments after take off. It is revealed that Winston is being targeted by the mafia, and they have agents and spies everywhere. We don’t even need to ask why Daryl’s ID was in the plane (but we should) because her not asking the one rogue element for identification in this scenario is unhinged.

So like many horror films, this film is already building off a questionable foundation. But it only compounds itself. We have Winston in the back of the plane, restrained. The other two are ignoring him and wear headsets to talk to each other. Winston sees the ID and wants to warn Madolyn, but cannot. Later, after Daryl’s dangerous nature is revealed, Winston and Madolyn are in the front and Daryl is restrained. Daryl proceeds to harass them both vocally, to get in there heads. Do they put on the headsets and ignore him? Of course not! There’d be no drama if they did that.

So we have a bad foundation for a plot to happen, and a screenplay that doesn’t follow its own rules. A tendency to… make things up on the fly, as it were. How’s the rest of it? Well, Madolyn has a forced backstory of regret, that she messes up a lot and her higher-ups don’t trust her. Well, I’d hate to break it to her but this scenario isn’t helping. This is before she “actually messes up” in the plot. Astounding.

But surely typecast Mark Wahlberg as a villain is interesting at least? You would think that. Normally small movies like these are great vehicles for an actor to show more range. Unfortunately the script really doesn’t give him much to do besides growl and bare his teeth like a dog. There’s also the issue that there isn’t much to do on a plane. Is there? They knock him out. He get’s up. They knock him out again. Repeat. He isn’t even the actual villain of the story.

And what a story. It ends just as it feels like it is beginning; not satisfying at all. This could be the opening of a Bond movie, or any other thriller, leading towards an exciting police/courtroom drama. But it just stops. I virtually laughed when the one likeable character (heard on the radio for 99% of the movie) is revealed at the end as “the rewarding sight” only for him to be ADR’ed.

I’m not being very objective, but when the issues stack up like this it is hard to ignore them all. The finale is reasonably tense, and the technical means of getting there aren’t too farfetched (once you get by the initial setup problems). But boy the journey getting there doesn’t make it worthwhile.

Oh yeah, Topher Grace was there too.