Fight or Flight is a decent to pretty good action flick—contingent on how much you enjoy graphic depictions of brutal deaths—packaged in a sobering newspaper article because the nice wrapping paper had run out.
For viewers who want any element of surprise entering the movie, please avoid the incredibly spoiler-full trailer. But, sometimes, the main point of the “story” is just to get our main character, Josh Hartnett’s drunk and belligerent Lucas that fights (and kills) like a demon, on a plane. And that’s completely fine…
Until it proceeds to take a swing at a too-real social issue and falls incredibly flat. It’s a wild emotional swing to go from characters in an action comedy saying one-liners after killing people to a heartfelt talk about how there is a need to stop child slave labour… or an incredibly pressing need to, say, have world peace.
The writing also griiiiinds to a halt whenever they get away from the high octane action on the plane, which is genuinely quite fun. It’s almost like a host at a live show shouting that they are cutting away to commercials, resulting in a perceptible and precipitous dip in pacing. This makes the plot twists in the movie feel completely unearned.
These scenes interrupt the film’s most fun sequences, which mostly involve gruesome, bloody, and explicit deaths. The crew clearly had a lot of fun turning everything in a plane into something dangerous, from the first-class wine bottles to seatbelts and carry-on baggage space, which will not help any of my anxieties for every flight for the rest of my life.
The action choreography is quite good, and largely better than MANY modern action films that employ a shaky camera and horrendous lighting to hide their actors. Kudos to Josh Harnett for clearly being in many of these shots, and also for infusing his character with layer of physical comedy that’s becoming increasingly uncommon in Hollywood.
Fight or Flight is out now!