Mark Wahlberg does anything but ground the pulp thriller Flight Risk

Finally, the American public learns how it would have gone down on 9/11 had Mark Wahlberg boarded American Airlines Flight 11. Turns out that he wasn’t wrong about the amount of blood he’d have spilled in the cabin. It’s just that half of it would’ve been his, and the rest would have sourced from the pilot, plus the funniest passenger on the manifest for good measure. That’s more or less how things go in Flight Risk, Mel Gibson’s new film, anyways, and it seems reasonable to extrapolate the events of its narrative to Wahlberg’s obnoxious and self-aggrandizing fantasy. 

Here, Gibson inverses Wahlberg’s delusions of action-hero competence by paring down the scale to chamber drama dimensions and liberally dusting the plot with grit for good measure. Rather than the good guy, Wahlberg plays the heavy, “Daryl Booth,” a hick pilot in Alaska assigned to fly Deputy U.S. Marshal Madelyn Harris (Michelle Dockery) and her ward, Winston (Topher Grace), to Anchorage, where Harris’ superiors will take Winston into their custody as an informant; he has dirt on a preternaturally dangerous (and virtually omnipresent) mob boss, Moretti, seen but never heard. Moretti wants Winston dead, understandably, and “Daryl” is one of his button men, a looney tune thrill killer whose love language is violence.

No, really. “You’re giving me a hard-on!” he shouts at Harris, deep into Flight Risk, once she exposes his ruse and the film becomes a question of whether she can successfully fly their bush plane toward civilization and safety. With only a psychopath and a pee-pants wiseass aboard for assistance, not to mention company, the odds would appear low. The snag Flight Risk runs into is quieting the viewer’s anxiety enough to make them assume even the smallest chance the craft will crash. It’s Chekhov’s aviation accident; the plane will touch down at some point, but we don’t know when, or under what circumstances. They can’t crash in the Alaskan mountains because Liam Neeson isn’t on the cast list; they can’t crash over the Gulf of Alaska, or the Bering Sea, or wherever the hell they’re supposedly flying, either, not just because the movie’s geography is lacking, but because Robert Redford isn’t around. 

The actor giving Gibson the most grief here, though, is Wahlberg. Fair is fair: Flight Risk has a Daryl problem no matter whether he’s played by Wahlberg or an actor actually capable of exuding the leering, unsophisticated menace Wahlberg that tries and fails to wring from the character, because the limits of his range as an actor are set in concrete. Flight Risk doesn’t need Daryl for anything other than takeoff. After that, the fact of his existence dispels the possibility that Harris and Winston will go down in flames, because the movie’s confidence in its ability to suspend the audience’s disbelief is overridden by him. If Gibson or screenwriter Jared Rosenberg knew how to keep us guessing as to whether or not the plane will stay aloft, the film wouldn’t need Daryl, though having Daryl would be okay if Gibson had cast, say, John Carroll Lynch or Pruitt Taylor Vince instead of Wahlberg, or gone for the gold by hiring Paul Giamatti. Hollywood has a robust stable of middle-aged men capable of oozing down-home charm to suffuse their inner menace, and none of them need a bald cap for added emphasis, either.

Wahlberg’s hare-brained hairpiece isn’t the worst thing about his work here. It’s that he plays Daryl the same way he plays most of his characters, mixing tough guy bravado and a Labrador Retriever’s guilelessness, with a hokey good ol’ boy accent on top. Before his cover is blown, Daryl reads like Thomas Mann doing a Foghorn Leghorn impression. After, he’s Wahlberg, and not from his Fear days, but from his Seth MacFarlane, I Heart Huckabees, and Adam McKay days. Dockery and Grace come off better, comparatively and on their own merits, though Wahlberg’s clumsy efforts at villainy highlight his co-stars’ strengths and shared chemistry; without sending Flight Risk’s tone off-course, Grace snaps off nervous one-liners and sardonic quips with casual ease, while Dockery continues reconfiguring her regal Downton Abbey persona for characters made from sterner stuff than Lady Mary. 

They work well together, the remorseful jester and the guilty gentry, because naturally, Rosenberg’s script accessorizes Harris with a tragic backstory—another hurdle to overcome, because flying a plane with no training while restraining a yapping sadist at the same time isn’t enough of a challenge. But over-writing doesn’t delay Flight Risk’s pace or tension; Wahlberg does. The actor ended up apologizing for his boneheaded 9/11 remarks not long after making them. Maybe one day he’ll apologize for Flight Risk, too.

Director: Mel Gibson
Writer: Jared Rosenberg
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Dockery, Topher Grace
Release Date: January 24, 2025