Flight RIsk

Sandwiched between two heavily computer-orchestrated sequences, that impart nothing other than a revolting sense of unreality, sits the meat of Flight Risk, a lightly twisted tale of frustrated extradition. Mel Gibson's latest makes an excretable first impression, even with the disgraced director's name deliberately elided from any ad campaign that preceded the film. Instantly we're hammered with a succession of collapsed digital imagery, from a motel exterior so stylistically overwrought and disconnected from the tone of the piece that it prompts laughter, to a badly composited telephoto appraisal of a landing strip. Worse still, Topher Grace's mob accountant is written to be funny but, sadly, with the objective of pleasing an audience who find the prospect of a grown man being unable to attend to his own toiletry duties the height of comedy. 

Eventually we're trapped in a creaking Cessna, pointed directly at a snowy mountain range, with Michelle Dockery's US Marshal and Mark Wahlberg's snarling pilot bickering over the controls. Dockery, when given centre stage in the latter half of Flight Risk, brings a beleaguered likability with her that accentuates the nightmarish task of having to keep a light aircraft from nosediving. Wahlberg's drooling belligerent is the highlight though, although largely for his increasingly pained and contorted face as well as the ways in which his florid description of sexual violence seem so completely at odds with a film that otherwise feels like a bottle episode in a long-running TV serial. Completely unrecognisable as the work of a director that previously delivered Apocalypto, fans of Gibson's fixation on self-flagellation may like to note that far more attention is paid to the ruinous damage that Wahlberg's balding maniac gleefully inflicts upon himself than any of the bodily trauma otherwise deployed to vanquish this pest.