Fight Or Flight

Firstly, a pedantic note: while that phrase makes for a nice bit of cinematic wordplay, this film really should be called ‘Fight On Flight’. Because this is a plot with a joyfully silly high-concept premise, which essentially allows for 90 minutes of brawling at 30,000 feet. The film begins, as if to emphasise this point, with a frantic montage of airborne violence: a meal trolley shoved into someone’s crotch, an Uzi disarmed by a dropkick, and a chainsaw merrily thrown into Economy class. And that’s in the first two minutes.

Then we flash back to 12 hours earlier. Some sort of shady quasi-governmental organisation is tracking a “blackhat terrorist” known only as The Ghost. He is, we’re told in mile-a-minute exposition, an über-hacker, who has crashed the GDP of multiple countries and “destroyed Yemen’s oil reserves”. This mysterious organisation tracking The Ghost — whose true nature is only revealed late in the film — decides to recruit a down-on-his-luck mercenary, a bleach-blond drunkard named Lucas Reyes (Josh Hartnett, having a marvellous time).

His mission is simple: in order to get his old life back, Lucas must board a plane from Bangkok to San Francisco, identify and subdue The Ghost, and escort them safely back to America. But there’s a wrinkle: The Ghost has many enemies, and they’ve all gotten wind of this escape plan, the flight’s passenger manifest suddenly filled with a rogues’ gallery of hitmen. It all leads to the immortal line, delivered gamely by The Mandalorian’s Katee Sackhoff: “Are you telling me that plane is full of killers?”

What it lacks in polish and panache it makes up for in humour.

So, yes, it’s a ludicrous mash-up of Midnight Run, The Raid and Bullet Train (‘Bullet Plane’?), borrowing a bit of a John Wick logic that practically everyone in the world is a deadly assassin. It’s refreshing and fun to see such a gonzo, go-for-broke approach with the idea, and it’s equally cheering to see Hartnett commit fully, with an enjoyably deranged performance almost on a par with his turn in last year’s Trap (especially in the third act, when he accidentally gets mashed off his nut on toad venom).

Dressed variously in a Hawaiian shirt, a pink tee and airplane-issue pyjamas, Hartnett cuts an unlikely figure as an action star, but he convincingly throws some solid punches, even if the choreography here isn’t quite at Wick levels of excellence. What it lacks in polish and panache it makes up for in humour, with an array of inventively amusing kills — a sprinkler nozzle to the skull, a broken champagne glass to the nose, a seatbelt to the neck, etc.

The film overall benefits from this lightness, from a dedication to unseriousness, populating its margins with unexpectedly funny supporting characters — such as the pilots hoping to get a Tom Hanks-style Sully movie out of all the madness, or the steward who passive-aggressively instructs his staff, “Remember: happy faces, look alive.” This is a deeply silly film, and knows it too, and first-time feature director James Madigan — who has a background in visual effects and second-unit directing, including work on The Meg — infuses everything with confidence and ambition. Sometimes its modest budget belies those ambitions, but you have to admire the chutzpah. The end of the film suggests the story is not yet done, too, a prospect we’d gladly welcome. ‘Fights Or Flights’?