Flight Risk review: Mark Wahlberg thriller crashes and burns

In Flight Risk, Mark Wahlberg jettisons his usual air of dimly perturbed gym-rat nobility to play a blathering psychotic scoundrel. How do we know the guy’s a world-class creep? Early into this janky airborne suspense contraption, he drops not just his feigned yokel friendliness but also the baseball cap pulled tightly over his noggin, which falls off to reveal a rather George Constanza paucity of follicles. Wahlberg insists he actually shaved his head for the role, but you look at that not-so-gleaming dome — whose pigment doesn’t always seem to even match the actor’s grinning mug — and really have to wonder. Real or not, the baldness is baldly phony, a put-on from a jock poorly cosplaying the profile of an oily murderer.

Wahlberg’s character, Daryl Booth, is a pilot who moonlights as a hitman, or maybe vice versa. He spends long stretches of Flight Risk’s short runtime zip-tied in the back of a cramped puddle jumper, hissing threats and lecherous innuendos at a Deputy U.S. Marshal (Michelle Dockery) and her apprehended charge, a mob accountant (Topher Grace) turned state witness. Nearly foaming at the mouth, Wahlberg comes across as less menacingly deranged than pathetically scummy. Watching him berate the officer with venomous come-ons, you’d almost swear that he was channeling Mel Gibson’s infamous DUI tantrum. Except that the director in the cockpit of this rickety vessel is… Mel Gibson.

It was probably only a matter of time before Hollywood’s premier god-fearing, publicist-vexing tough guys joined forces. What do you get when a star prone to fantasizing about real-world terrorist attacks hooks up with a director obsessed with gory martyrdom? No doubt the two could make a truly bonkers saga of messianic mayhem, but that doesn’t much describe Flight Risk. It’s more of a rinky-dink B-movie howler, bad without ascending to the delirious heights of bad taste you might expect or even secretly desire from this pairing.

Gibson, up to this point, has mostly directed bloated pageants of death and suffering — epic flagellation fests that bring the wars and sacrifices of yesterday to bloody life. Again, Flight Risk is not of that ilk. It’s more like a down-and-dirty palate cleanser before the filmmaker’s return to more lordly matters. (Coming to a multiplex near you, eventually, maybe: The Passion of the Christ Part II!) To that end, there’s certainly potential for solid thrills in the film’s minimalist premise, in which Wahlberg’s lunatic killer masquerades as the flyboy carting Dockery’s marshal from remote Alaska to less remote Anchorage. Most of the film takes place in the sky, as our heroine juggles her cuffed fugitive and the cold-blooded madman while getting a radio crash course on how not to crash the metal bird.

But Gibson botches the assignment at every turn. You needn’t harbor any contempt for the disgraced filmmaker to peg Flight Risk as cheap and choppy heckle fodder. His aerial scenes are a hash of unconvincing turbulence, cutting between the digital equivalent of a toy plane and “zomg!” close-ups of the actors furrowing and bellowing during free fall. Evidence of a mole within the Marshall ranks is uncovered via long-distance correspondence that often fails, through mucked-up timing, to create the illusion of two people conversing. And the acoustic logistics of this tumbling aircraft are conveniently wonky. One minute, the characters can hear each other over the howling wind. The next, Daryl can sever his shackles undetected.

The dialogue, a black box of tin-eared wisecracks courtesy of first-time screenwriter Jared Rosenberg, could leave a viewer grateful for a little high-altitude white noise. (Scenes of queasy aerial unsteadiness aside, this is the rare movie that might actually play better on a flight with only one earbud in.) The at-odds criminals onboard trade dopey Spirit Airlines cracks and discuss the “Jackson Pollock” all the nosediving makes in their trousers. The contained three-hander scenario should be a gift to the actors, but they’re flying blind with this script and director. Dockery, whose graceful severity has served her well in Downton Abbey’s world of refined manners, keeps her head down and her upper lip stiff. And Grace could play this sniveling, sarcastic milquetoast in his sleep. He’s on twerpy autopilot.

Wahlberg, meanwhile, is out of his element. In so much as Flight Risk has a hook, it’s a chance to see the pious action hero cast against type and back in touch with his dark side for the first time since his breakout role as the alpha-bro boyfriend from Hell in 1996’s Fear. But while that movie put his beefcake blankness to good use, he just seems miscast as a raving sadist here. The performance takes its cue from the unnatural hairstyling; if the smoothed cranium is real, the malevolent lunacy sure isn’t. Only when the star grits his teeth and snaps his own thumb to escape handcuffs do you buy what he’s putting down. That’s the very kind of pain-freak determination you’d expect from un film de Gibson and Wahlberg.

Flight Risk is now playing in theaters everywhere. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.