As one of the biggest fights in “Fight or Flight” comes to an end, Lucas Reyes (Josh Hartnett), the disgraced FBI agent at the center of James Madigan’s new airplane-set action comedy, does a little backwards somersault into a Spider-Man pose. You know the one – one hand on the ground, leg splayed, head up and eyes alert.
Except, when Reyes does the pose, things look a little different. First of all, he’s a little too inebriated to get through the somersault portion with grace. He’s the walking definition of rumpled, bleary-eyed and puffy, and when he lands the pose, he very nearly falls over. As much as the pose might signal “hero,” Reyes is not the superhero type.
“Fight or Flight” is about as rickety as Reyes is in this moment. And yet, it’s still far more entertaining than the cleaner, higher budget version of this movie (think something like 2022’s “Bullet Train” – too sleek, too safe, and frankly, a little too boring). “Fight or Flight” is by no means great, and a little too complicated for its own good. But it is a reminder of what the best version of this type of movie is – low budget, kind of dumb in a fun way, starring a guy who’s willing to push it to the limit.
At the beginning of “Fight or Flight,” Reyes is living in Bangkok, ousted from the FBI and the U.S. for reasons unknown. He’s quickly recruited by his old partner (and girlfriend), Katherine Brunt (Katee Sackhoff), to track down an elusive hacker known as the Ghost, who is expected to soon be on board a flight from Bangkok to San Francisco. In an attempt to get his old life back, Reyes agrees, but quickly learns there’s a bounty on the Ghost’s head, and he’s not the only killer aboard this plane.
One of the film’s issues is how unnecessarily elaborate it attempts to be, in spite of the simplicity of its premise (man boards plane, assassins try to kill man – should be easy, right?). There’s a pretty funny gag where the Katee Sackhoff-led government sect is operating in secret as part of a social media app. But that joke is funnier in theory than in practice – everything that happens back in the government control room is a slog, disrupting the pacing and energy of everything happening on the plane.
But even the action on the plane, at times, becomes a little too convoluted. It seems there are barely any normal passengers on this flight, and while most of the bounty hunters introduced are nameless, faceless killers, there are a few characters the movie introduces at the last minute who the audience is ostensibly supposed to care about. But, outside of Reyes and Isha (Charithra Chandran), a flight attendant who gets caught up in the action, there are no real emotional threads to hold onto. When those extra characters get got, as it were, the movie treats it like a huge loss, but it hasn’t expended the labor to make the audience actually care.
“Fight or Flight” is best when it stays small. That extends to the fight sequences as well, the best of which is a one-on-one spat between Reyes and an attacker in the first class bathroom. While that fight feels claustrophobic, and kinetic, and everything else you want from a grimy action movie tête-à-tête, when the fights get bigger, the energy dips. Things are harder to follow, and the visual style is just a bit flatter than you want from a giant, bounty-hunter filled brawl.
There’s a certain type of nihilism to “Fight or Flight” during those bigger fights – men are shot in the head, or cut clean through with chain saws, and you really feel absolutely nothing, eyes glazed over with all the gore. At the same time, the movie attempts to shoot for some sort of emotional catharsis it never quite achieves. The playful banter between Hartnett and Chandran is about as good as you can hope for a movie like this, but whenever they move into a more serious mode, it’s difficult to take them seriously when the rest of the film is so unruly.
For however many flaws “Fight or Flight” has, however, Hartnett manages to hold everything together. In the past few years, he’s had about as great of a comeback as a former teen heartthrob could hope for, and post “Trap,” it’s become apparent that he excels at playing unmitigated psychos. “Fight or Flight” features another totally committed performance from Hartnett – his humor, his physicality, his dead-eyed dedication, make “Fight or Flight” at least kind of worth the ticket.
