Fight or Flight Review

If Josh Hartnett feels like he missed out on the Crank-style action movies of the late 2000s, Fight or Flight gives him the strange opportunity to circle back. Arguably Hartnett’s first movie as an action lead, Fight or Flight is in the tradition of winkingly over-the-top exercises like Shoot ‘Em Up and Drive Angry that make a point to revel in their own violent ridiculousness. With the novelty of those quais-trangressions long since worn off, however, this approach needs more than pure attitude to really succeed.

Fight or Flight is self-consciously edgy even before it gets into any actual mayhem. It opens with the profane control-room panic of steely corporate agent Aaron Hunter (Julian Kostov) and his steelier boss Katherine Brunt (Katee Sackhoff) as they realize that a tech-savvy fugitive nicknamed the Ghost has nabbed an all-powerful digital device (yes, one of those) and is about to fly from Bangkok to San Francisco. Everything Brunt and Hunter say to each other is pure movie-world stupidity, directed by James Madigan with the apparent hope that coaxing the actors to read every line with as much brusque, controlled fury as possible will increase the urgency. These are the kind of bad control-room scenes viewers tolerate to get to the implied promise of onscreen havoc, and Katherine seems ready to deliver: Desperate and lacking operatives on the ground to reach the plane in time, she calls in disgraced former agent Lucas Reyes (Hartnett) – the only man left for the job! (Liam Neeson must’ve been unavailable.)

Because so much of Fight or Flight proceeds in fits and starts, it takes a while to realize that Hartnett’s main job is stringing the movie along, doing his best to legitimize a cutely ridiculous premise that mutates into an even more outlandish one. First, Lucas is tasked with boarding the plane, figuring out who the Ghost is during the flight, and bringing them into custody alive when they land. But it turns out others have figured out that the Ghost is on this flight, too, and aren’t so keen on keeping their target alive, which means Lucas has to fight off a plane’s worth of attackers, assassins, and mercenaries after he’s unmasked the Ghost.

That Hartnett is able to even take this material halfway is a huge credit to his re-ascendant star. Imagine, prior to the releases of Trap and Oppenheimer, watching an action movie where the saving grace, classiest element, and battered soul are all the former heartthrob of The Faculty and Pearl Harbor fame. Visibly doing many of his own stunts, Hartnett’s performance is more physical and less psychological than his exemplary work as M. Night Shyamalan’s serial-killer-disguised-as-doting-dad; at his core, Lucas Reyes is more like a thin character out of Bullet Train, the David Leitch beat-’em-up that this movie frequently recalls.

To Madigan’s credit, the craziest action in Fight or Flight goes a lot harder than Bullet Train. There are a solid 15 minutes or so where sheer tripped-out cartoon madness takes over, piling on the unlikely additions – hallucinations, a chainsaw – with glee. But that’s not much of the movie, and the director struggles to coherently convey what, exactly, is going on in between those all-in melees. For example, some time is taken to point out that at least a few people on the manifest really are normal civilians. But rather than up the stakes, this only serves to make Fight or Flight seem careless about what actually happens to the passengers who don’t deserve to die. Whatever their edgelord tendencies, Crank and Shoot ‘Em Up are less haphazard about navigating that line between silly provocation and complete disregard for collateral damage, while less amped movies like Neeson’s Non-Stop do a better job of building toward pulpy pandemonium.

In the end, Fight or Flight isn’t even really interesting enough to be genuinely nihilistic. It’s just another uneven action exercise, proudly saying nothing about its ill-defined characters. (The only character other than Lucas who isn’t a visual gimmick or a one-note caricature is the flight attendant played by Charithra Chandran.) It zaps to life for a couple of fight sequences and becomes robotically dreadful in the many pointless control-room scenes. Back in 2008 or so, this might have been Josh Hartnett’s best starring vehicle in ages. Congratulations are in order that by 2025, he clearly deserves something better.