Aerial Thriller Falls Comedically Flat

Making its official debut in the United States on January 24th, the anticipated action-thriller movie, Flight Risk, has attracted mixed reviews. 

The main plot of the film is that U.S. Marshal board member, Madelyn Harris (Michelle Dockery), is tasked with returning American witness, Winston (Topher Grace), back to New York in order to testify against his old boss. The two are escorted to a plane where they meet their pilot who is played by Wahlberg. After the introduction of the pilot the fun, comedic, and light-hearted flight related jokes slowly begin to fade; being replaced instead with a more serious atmosphere as the action scenes start to occur. This type of heaviness carries all throughout the rest of the movie all the way to the ending.

The film was highly commercialized and seemed to be gathering a large potential audience. Even the main villain in the movie was played by big name actor, Mark Wahlberg. For many viewers the main reason they chose to go see this film was due to the fact that Mark Wahlberg was featured in it. Walhberg had not been in a movie since the 2022 film Me Time which flopped in the box office. This meant that many fans were ready to see Walhberg make a comeback in the movie industry; however, they would be disappointed. Similarly to Me Time, Flight Risk was reported as “a mess of a movie, and no amount of threatening huffing and puffing on Wahlberg’s part can make it worthwhile.” This was reported by The Vulture, a popular movie critic website.

While some critics like the ones on Rotten Tomatoes try to explain that the movie is “dumb and whacked out fun” with “flash and features strange and watchable performances” the movie was not commercialized to audiences that it would be a comedy. And if the film was trying to be a comedy, halfway through the movie it switches so fast to a supposed thriller film that a viewer might just get whiplash.

Some people who did watch the movie like Champaign Central High School senior, Chris Folsom, said it was “interesting,” that the movie “started off funny, but then it just randomly swapped to a bunch of action scenes. After that there was no more comedy at all.”

Overall if you’re really thinking about seeing this movie wait for it to be free somewhere and watch it then. It is definitely not the best movie in theatres to see right now; but if you don’t care and want to watch it then go ahead.