Mel Gibson’s thriller is your typical January movie

“Flight risk” is a modest matter. It has a frankly frugal budget of $25 million, and is set almost entirely aboard a small support plane. There are only three actors on screen for most of the film’s 91-minute runtime, and the concept is easy to understand. In execution, it feels like a confident first turn from a neophyte director. Perhaps evil, but well-intentioned, and only occasionally straining against his obviously limited means.

Only this is not a first-time director’s film. This is a Mel Gibson movie, the once-respected Oscar Darling and Hitaveker now ostracized for their many offensive public outbursts and unhealthy personal views. Gibson, as a director, has overseen multiple heavy and violent historical pictures, many of them impressively staged and visually stunning. This was the man who upped the Hollywood epic game with “Braveheart,” and turned the last days of Jesus into brutal “terrible” gore with “the passion of the Christ.” One might find his films to be assertively masculine, a little assertively Christian, or perhaps melodramatic, but they never lacked ambition. Two of his films were staged in ancient languages.

A “flight risk,” Gibson’s marked career has pushed him back to the practical and modest. In 2016, it appears that academy voters were halfway through accepting him back into the room by nominating his war film “Hacksaw Ridge” for six Oscars (it won two), but whatever good will he accrued, Gibson immediately came out on top. comfort to find solace in The arms of Dunderhead to the sportsmen’s right. More recently, Gibson was declared to be a sort of Hollywood ambassador for the Trump administration, although the details of his mission remain unclear.

The “risk of flight,” however, may be the director’s last call for level diplomacy. It’s a simple thriller with light politics and no harsh morals. It is neither epic nor preachy. It’s a light and simple Saturday matinee.

The “risk of flight” premise is very efficient, and was so clearly designed to be made on the cheap that it would make Roger Corman or Jason Blum happen. Michelle Dockery played a hard-working American marshal named Harris, who is tasked with transporting a mob accountant named Walter (Topher Grace) from his off-grid Alaskan hideout to the big city. She aims to testify against a mafia Don. Harris’s only means of transporting Walter is a small, rickety, privately chartered plane, flown by a colorful local pilot named Daryl (Gibson’s “Daddy’s Home 2” and “Father Stu” co-star Mark Wahlberg). Most of the movie will take place on that plane. The movie will end with her… well, I won’t spoil if she lands, crashes, or does a third secret thing.

It seems, however, that Daryl is not what he seems. Early in the flight, Walter and Harris find that Daryl is, in fact, a brutal, ill-tempered killer with a penchant for torture. He killed and replaced the original pilot, and is how to fly his charges to God understands, where he murders them both in creative ways. Why not kill them both right away? Because Daryl likes to take time; When Harris learns of Daryl’s previous crimes, there are references to eyeballs and the like.

Wahlberg is wrong as a vicious serial killer. It’s meant to be menacing and sinister, but it seems no worse than a particularly unpleasant beer one might find in a Boston pub. Because it lacks a vital sense of Hannibal horror, the film never emerges as wholly threatening. It feels more like a problem-solving exercise than a thriller.

Walter, the script (by Jared Rosenberg) assures us, is a fun chat full of nervous energy, but Grace seems too relaxed and affable playing her character’s anxious traits. Like Wahlberg, he doesn’t bring the right kind of surging energy to his role, happy to remain in the realm of “cool.” Both characters seem to escape a more adult thriller because they didn’t feel comfortable going to sharper extremes.

Far better than Wahlberg or Grace, in fact, carrying the film on his back, is Dockery, who affects the resolution of an action hero, who seems clear and eager to solve extreme problems. She reads like a Starfleet officer, a capable problem solver who is never out of ideas. When you lose your cool, it is not a moment of temporary madness, but perhaps a thoughtful moment of steadfastness. It’s okay, he seems to imagine, to punch Daryl in the face right now.

After the initial plot twist of the first act (revealed in the film’s trailers), “Flight Risk” has no more surprises for the audience. The tension is not built as much and it ends smoothly. Gibson brings no sense of ignition or flair to “Flying Risk” that couldn’t have been brought to bear by any other halfway capable director. It is in fact, direct and simple. Simple on a plane. It appears to have been intended for casual cable television consumption, recommended after one finished watching three or four episodes of “Law & Order.” Or, more appropriately, it feels like a January movie. Even if it had come out in July, “Flight Risk” would be a January movie.

“Flight Hazard” is perfectly useful, completely harmless entertainment. Alright. It’s meh.

However, this is a baffling disadvantage for a filmmaker as contested and typically ambitious as Gibson. Of course, there is no such thing as a film without politics, all art is political, but the filmmaker seems determined to be as neutral as possible with this low-budget thriller. He is not making statements, fleeing any notion that he might be proselytizing. “Flight risk” is as substantive as an airport novel, as nutritious as a marshmallow.

Which, a more cynical viewer might suspect, is a calculation on Gibson’s part. You may feel that your politics and your…controversies…will alienate the public, so you need to be on your best behavior. Can you make a movie for just $25 million dollars? Yes. Can you tell a story efficiently? Yes. Are the actors good? They take advantage. Is it taut, elegant and unique? You are welcome. There’s nothing to be offended about in “flight risk,” apparently by design. There’s nothing to be excited about in “Flight Risk” either, floating slightly to the middle of the road.

But no film was thrown into the void. Some may stay away from “flying risk” because of Gibson’s off-screen antics, and that’s their right. Some can only compartmentalize so hard. It is certainly an episode of bad weather that Gibson I just became Trump’s ambassador Just when his movie hit theaters. It will be difficult to look at “flight risk” without thinking about what the director intends to do in Hollywood in the year 2025.

Beyond that, the movie is just okay.

/Movie rating: 5 out of 10

“Flight Hazard” is in theaters now.