Fight or Flight comes to us from Asbury Park Productions, which puts it two or three degrees removed from 87North. Screenwriter Brooks McLaren only has one other credit to his name, and it was a pre-COVID Netflix original. Co-writer D.J. Cotrona makes his screenwriting debut after coming up as a D-list supporting actor in various action films and TV shows. As for director James Madigan, this is his feature debut.
Given this lack of experience from all involved, it’s both little wonder the movie falls short in the ways that it does, and yet surprising the film works as well as it does.
Our premise begins with the Ghost, an internationally wanted terrorist with a $10 million bounty. Trouble is, there’s literally zero data about the Ghost on file — nothing about gender, height, weight, age, nationality, or anything else. All that anyone knows is that the Ghost recently blew up a building in Bangkok, and all signs point to an escape via the nearest airport. Specifically, on a plane headed to San Francisco.
Naturally, there’s a clandestine organization eager to catch the Ghost in the interest of national security. This organization is mostly embodied by the hotheaded asshole Aaron Hunter (Julian Kostov) and his boss, the cold and calculating Katherine Brunt (goddamn, it’s good to see Katee Sackhoff back onscreen and repping for PDX). Unfortunately, they don’t have any agents in the region who can get to the Ghost in time. Except they do. Kinda sorta.
Enter Lucas Reyes, played by Josh Hartnett in what’s shaping up to be an impressive career renaissance. To cut a long and spoiler-driven story short, Reyes was a government agent who got disavowed after a mission gone horribly wrong. As a direct result, he’s been stranded in Bangkok and left to drink himself to death for the past two years. Out of desperation, Blunt calls him up and offers him a clean slate in exchange for the safe live capture of the Ghost.
But of course it’s not that simple. We quickly learn that someone — somehow, for whatever reason — leaked the Ghost’s itinerary to the dark web. In turn, this means that every cutthroat, mercenary, and government agent who wants the Ghost dead and/or wants the $10 million bounty is on that plane over the Pacific. Which means our hero doesn’t know who’s a civilian, who’s a hostile killer, and who’s the terrorist he’s been sent to capture alive. And we’re off to the races.
Just to get this out of the way up front, the fight scenes are shit. These filmmakers were already fighting an uphill battle by virtue of the premise, as all the action happens on a plane. The setting is too constrained to allow for stunts or elaborate fight scenes, and it’s too homogenous for much variety. Yes, the filmmakers try their best to branch into the first class section, the cargo hold, and other areas of the plane, but it’s simply not enough.
Far more importantly, literally every fight scene in this movie is shot in handheld shaky-cam. Like that didn’t go out of style twenty freaking years ago. Between the aggressively shaky camerawork, the incompetent editing, and the humdrum choreography (or maybe the choreography only looks like crap because of how it’s shot and edited, I can’t really tell), every fight scene in this movie looks like trash.
Which sucks all the more because I can understand and respect what the filmmakers were going for. Seriously, in the hands of a director who actually knew how to shoot and choreograph fight scenes, this could’ve been a banger.
The obvious point of comparison is with Bullet Train, that 87North misfire that tried and failed at being an effective action/comedy. And it was another film set on a traveling metal tube loaded with cutthroats. But there are a number of reasons why Fight or Flight came much closer to succeeding.
For one thing, Bullet Train was more of a screwball comedy, featuring a complex plot with a multitude of intricate moving parts. By contrast, Fight or Flight revolves around a stone-simple premise that turns out to be a launching pad for so many diabolically clever twists. It’s genuinely fascinating to learn that there’s more to the story than we initially thought, and not all the characters are who we’d been led to believe they were.
Yes, the movie certainly could’ve gone farther in exploring the anti-corporate themes. Then again, what we get is effective enough without distracting too much from the action and the surprise reveals are done in such a way that the point is clearly made. Moreover, while the plot twists help to make the film more compelling, they’re done in such a way that it’s easy to keep track of the characters, their motivations, and the morality involved. Granted, that means less time for the fight scenes and more time explaining the plot, but the fight scenes are so mishandled that taking time away from them isn’t as much of a drawback.
It’s another crucial factor that unlike some other failed action/comedy films I’ve seen recently, this movie doesn’t try to make every single hitman into something memorable. With only one or two short-lived exceptions, every hostile assassin in this picture is just a nameless faceless goon who’s there to get mowed down. While films like Bullet Train, Love Hurts, and The Killer’s Game all put their emphasis on a motley assortment of gimmicky assassins, this one puts a much greater emphasis on the poor dumb civilians who are simply trying to do their jobs and keep their sanity in all the crossfire. (Charithra Chandran, Danny Ashok, and Hughie O’Donnell are the three flight attendants who get most of the attention.)
Put simply, the aforementioned movies were more interested in the outrageous characters who were directly responsible for outrageous situations. This movie shows a much greater interest in the ordinary people with the misfortune of getting stuck in an outrageous situation. The contrast is far more endearing, and genuinely funnier.
Fight or Flight is a film whose reach far exceeds its grasp, emblematic of a first-time filmmaker. If this same director had done a straight comedy, I’m sure it would’ve been amazing. Set these same writers up with 87North or Radio Silence and it would probably be golden. As it is, we’ve got a solid cast playing off a script that’s genuinely funny and loaded with amazing twists. There’s really nothing wrong with this movie except for the action, which is kind of a big fucking problem in an action/comedy. Especially on the big screen opposite the far superior Thunderbolts*.
I so badly want to recommend this, but I can’t in good conscience go any higher than a home video recommendation.