2 min to read
Flight Risk
How good is Mel Gibson's newest film?
The Good: While I have a few issues with the movie (as you’ll see below), the one part of the movie that was extremely consistent was Mark Wahlberg’s performance. He played an exceptionally apathetic, brutal, and unhinged villain to near perfection. When there were flat moments in the movie, Mark Wahlberg would do something that would draw me back in and make the movie more enjoyable.
I was also pleasantly surprised by the camera work throughout the movie. With the movie taking place in a small commuter plane, I loved how they were able to show tons of angles of the inside of the plane despite the little room they had to film the movie.
The Meh: This movie felt like the act 2 and 3 of a movie. This flight aspect of this movie seems like it’s supposed to be in the latter part of a movie where they are trying to track down the criminal, showing a significant amount of the events leading to his capture. I think that could have made the story feel full. There is a lot of backstory given on the plane just because characters happen to ask questions or just happen to know things. If they could have shown all of that in the 1st act of the movie, they could have created a tightly/well written flight part of the movie, making the events on the plane feel exciting/nerve racking and more important. By doing this, the movie could have had so much more life.
In addition to my previous point, having the movie only be about the flight was enough for a whole movie. Even by watching just the trailer you could tell exactly what was going to happen in the movie. This became even worse while in the movie. Yes, some points weren’t predictable, but most of the movie was, making stressful moments fall flat and makes everything be anticlimactic. Additionally, the movie isn’t super long, being an hour and a half long, and because of that there were so many things that were “spoiled” just in the trailer to get people to get slightly interested in the movie. If this movie could have been just the 2nd half of a movie, having the twist that the pilot came out of nowhere, this movie could have been genuinely awesome.
The Bad: The main issue with the movie is the tone. It is completely inconsistent. The movie inherently has a more serious tone, but one of the characters in particular keeps trying to say something funny, and none of it is funny either! Every time this happened I just got extremely frustrated at the movie’s writing because (1) they could have at least had funnier things be said and (2) it was just very distracting. Don’t try to make a serious movie a comedy, and if you want to, at least make the jokes funny.
Overall: This is an enjoyable enough movie, but I still don’t think the premise of the movie really doesn’t work for an entire movie. This movie was kept together by Mark Wahlberg’s performance, but I really wish the story was better for the performance given.
Rating: 3/5
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