Review: Mel Gibson’s exceptionally awful Flight Risk might have Trump rethink that Hollywood ambassador idea | Canada Voices

• Flight Risk
• Directed by Mel Gibson
• Written by Jared Rosenberg
• Starring Michelle Dockery, Topher Grace and Mark Wahlberg
• Classification 14A; 91 minutes
• Opens in theatres Jan. 24

Last week, ahead of his inauguration, U.S. President Donald Trump appointed three past-their-prime movie stars to be what he called “special ambassadors” to Hollywood: Jon Voight, Sylvester Stallone and Mel Gibson.

As of yet, it is unclear what such a role will entail other than Trump’s vaguely defined wording of “bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to foreign countries, back – bigger, better and stronger than ever before.” It promises to be a curious mission, one that – in the absolute best-case scenario – will result in some kind of Expendables sequel that crosses over into the Rocky cinematic universe. Yet after watching Gibson’s latest directorial effort, an airborne thriller called Flight Risk, I cannot help but wonder if Trump might soon rescind his offer. Yes, Gibson’s new movie is so bad that even as grossly tasteless an individual as Trump might have trouble choking it down.

A C-grade thriller that is further dumbed down to dunce-cap calibre, Flight Risk might have worked as an enjoyably grimy piece of genre trash had Gibson not made every single wrong directorial decision along the way. From the casting to the action to the visual effects to the score, the film seems intent on identifying and then grinding down every element that makes a movie tolerable, forget even baseline entertaining.

Mistake No. 1 involves casting English actress Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey) as a hard-edged deputy U.S. marshal named Madelyn Harris. Dockery certainly has the range to play a kick-butt heroine, but she most certainly does not have the American accent – every line out of her mouth seems chewed over and spit out, as if the actress was disgusted by the dialogue itself (which is a fair response given Jared Rosenberg’s screenplay).

Faring even worse than Dockery is the usually reliable Topher Grace as a crooked mob accountant named Winston, who is nabbed by Madelyn in the depths of Alaska after evading both authorities and his one-time employer. Seemingly instructed by Gibson to play between the ranges of annoyingly whiny and lord-make-him-shut-up frustrating, Grace erases all the goodwill that he has built up over the years – much of it accrued by simply not being as awful as nearly all of his That ‘70s Show costars – in one fell swoop.

And wait: We haven’t even gotten to ostensible star Mark Wahlberg, who reunites here with his Father Stu pal Gibson in what must surely be some kind of kompromat-type of situation. Playing a mob hitman sent to assassinate Winston on his short-haul flight to Anchorage, Wahlberg is first-billed in the credits but spends much of the movie’s running time either passed out in the back of the plane, or crazily spouting such lines as, “This is gonna be fun!” while holding a knife to Dockery’s throat before being knocked out once again. It should also not go unmentioned that, for whatever reason, Wahlberg wears a bald cap and oscillates between a southern-fried accent and his native Boston growl, neither vocal register approximating anything close to how a normal human might speak.

I realize that all these flaming-dumpster elements might make the movie sound like a guilty-pleasure lark perfect for lazy late-January viewing – the cinematic equivalent to finding a few shiny coins in the gutter. But Flight Risk is not so bad that it is good – it is simply so bad that it is really terribly awfully very very very bad, the kind of zero-effort exercise that will leave even the most bruised and battered action-movie junkie begging for the sweet release of death itself.

Its sheer awfulness is also compounded by the fact that, up until this point, Gibson was a genuinely talented, once-in-a-generation filmmaker. No matter his toxic personal history – gee, I wonder what Gibson’s first order of business might be if he suddenly had command of Hollywood – the guy knew how to stage brutal action without sidelining character or story. In Flight Risk, Gibson is as far removed from his work on Apocalypto or Braveheart as his fellow Hollywood “ambassador” Voight is from his Midnight Cowboy era.

The fact that Flight Risk is playing real-deal movie theatres this weekend, as opposed to exclusive showings on Tubi every weeknight at 1:30 a.m., is as distressing as Trump’s electoral success. But neither are all that surprising, either. Sometimes, the laziest and loudest options prevail. I suppose, then, that this is the North American culture that we deserve. Today, we are all Expendables.