Flight Risk review: ground this Mark Wahlberg action movie

There appeared to be some promise with Flight Risk — Mark Wahlberg plays a villain role in a contained action/thriller that at 90 minutes long is pretty much taking place in real time. However, in actuality, it may have been more entertaining to simply raw dog this plane ride than see the thin story, half-baked characters and minimal action that makes this one an outright bore.

Flight Risk follows US Marshal Madolyn Harris (Michelle Dockery) as she is tasked with transporting a reluctant government witness, Winston (Topher Grace), from the Alaskan wilderness so he can appear in court to testify against a powerful crime boss. They have to take a small propeller plane piloted by a freelance pilot (Mark Wahlberg) to make it in time, but they soon learn that the pilot is not who he says he is, putting all of their lives at risk. Mel Gibson directed the movie with a script from Jared Rosenberg.

Things do not start off well for this movie, and I’m not even talking about the actual story or anything. There are a number of visual effect shots early on that are some of the worst I’ve seen in a movie in some time; cheap and entirely unconvincing. The only explanation I can make is that they were saving all of their money for the plane ride that makes up most of the movie. And while things do look better for that, it only means that all of the movie’s other weaknesses are even more obvious.

Dockery and Grace give it the old college try with their performances, but there is not a lot they can do with their flat and uninteresting characters. Dockery’s Madolyn has the cliched weight of a previously failed assignment hanging over her head, while the movie tries to portray Winston as the wise-cracking comedic relief, but none of the cracks particularly work.

Wahlberg, meanwhile, is having fun playing this deranged villain and is one of the only things that this movie has going for it; but I would not call it a good performance, rather it’s more of the scenery-chewing variety.

There are a couple of attempts to ramp things up as Madolyn tries to figure out how their mission was compromised and having to learn to fly a plane, but most of those subplots are handled over the phone with characters we never see and get minimal background on, so any developments on that front fail to drum interest either. If there was more dynamic stuff going on with the relationships and storylines on the plane, then maybe things could have ratcheted up a bit.

You can’t even bank on the movie’s action sequences to save the proceedings. There are really only a couple throughout the movie, and they are short and compact; it makes sense as they’re stuck in a small airplane, but doesn’t change the fact that they’re just not that interesting to watch.

When people talk about January being a dumping ground for bottom-of-the-barrel movies, Flight Risk is the type of thing they are talking about. Do yourself a favor and skip this disappointing 2025 new movie and instead try and catch up on the recent slate of Oscar nominated movies.

Flight Risk releases exclusively in movie theaters January 24 in the US, UK and elsewhere around the world.