Fight or Flight is couched to look like a high-concept, violent action thriller that might’ve come out between 1985 and 1995, and starred Jean-Claude Van Damme or Dolph Lundgren. But it’s primarily a comedy that derives most of its laughs from hilariously gruesome kills, the creative use of parts of an airplane, and mugging from star Josh Hartnett.
Directed by James Madigan, who’s been an effects guy and second-unit director for both movies and TV, Fight or Flight takes the John Wick series as the primary inspiration for its action style, although the plot is more like something from the Simpson-Bruckheimer heyday. It’s a low-budget film that punches above its weight.
Hartnett stars as Lucas Reyes, a disgraced former Secret Service agent who’s been in exile in Bangkok for years. He’s called up by his old boss (Katie Sackhoff) and offered a mission: Go on an international flight, where he must track and protect a mysterious individual known as “The Ghost.” The challenge? Almost everyone else on the plane is an assassin, determined to kill The Ghost and him.
Call it Smokin’ Aces on a plane, with an echo of Inception, in which Hartnett (like his contemporary Leonardo DiCaprio in that Christopher Nolan film) has to carry out a mission on a flight, and can only land safely if he’s successful. It’s a thin premise, one limited to what could realistically happen on an airplane, and the overarching plot is laughable and meaningless, something about international conspiracies, blackmail, and child labor exploitation. But none of that matters—what the film focuses on is Josh Hartnett, fighting people on a plane, usually ending with blood squirting from a surprising place.
The fight choreography is something to behold, with beverage carts, seatbelts, and airplane toilets used as weapons at various points, although I’m not sure why there was a reason for someone to have a chainsaw on a plane. The fight scenes are scored to fun music that’s heavy on Japanese surf rock.
It’s one of two movies out this week, Friendship the other, with a scene involving hallucinogenic toad venom. Both handle it much better than your typical drug-trip movie scene. I’m enjoying the Josh Hartnett renaissance. He’s gone from barely being in movies at all for a long period, to playing supporting roles in prestige pictures like Oppenheimer, to, in his mid-40s, having another act as the star of insane, high-concept action thrillers.
He capably carried M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap last summer, and he’s equally strong here, as a bleached-blond dude who’s hungover when we meet him and drug-addled. Bridgerton veteran Charithra Chandran more than holds her own as the woman on the plane who ends up as his sidekick.
There were a few little touches I loved, including the pilots realizing, mid-crisis, that they have a chance to emerge from the chaos as heroes like Captain Sully, which I’d have been into even if I hadn’t just watched the brilliant Captain Sully episode of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal.