Parents' Guide to Flight Risk

In a high-stakes action movie with fights breaking out in an unpiloted plane flying perilously above Alaska, audiences should be on the edge of their seats—instead, we're fiddling with the seatbelt. Which is surprising, since Jared Rosenberg's script for Flight Risk was voted one of the best unproduced scripts of 2020, and the stars have all demonstrated their talent in other projects. And whatever your feelings about Mel Gibson, he has skills as a director. So what happened here?

Flight Risk starts out with the kind of Lethal Weapon-style humor-action combo you might expect from Gibson—Wahlberg and Grace keep us giggling. But when things turn, this aerial thriller plummets. The bulk of the 91 minutes features three actors in one small, enclosed space, making it feel more like a play than a big-screen thriller. There's a lot of talk (including an astonishing amount of scenes that are basically a close-up of Dockery speaking through an aviation headset) and surprisingly little action. And Dockery's performance is part of the problem: Her calm, staccato delivery here is more appropriate for reading a systems manual than trying to keep herself and her witness safe from the psychopathic killer a few feet away while simultaneously learning how to fly a plane. Her lack of panic subdues viewers' own. And then there's the fact that it's difficult to cheer for her when she's, well, not very good at her job. It's also hard to see what Wahlberg gets out of being part of this production: His character says things you can't unhear, viscerally cementing him in the ickiest of contexts. Ultimately, this is a flight you'll want to cancel.