Fight or Flight Review: A Fully Committed Josh Hartnett Fills in the Familiar but Propulsive Action Comedy
Josh Hartnett plays an action hero with martial arts skills in Fight or Flight? Now, that’s something to look forward to, especially seeing the actor playing against type. He’s Lucas Reyes — blonde hair and looking like a slump when he is first introduced. He’s somewhere in Bangkok who prefers to spend time drinking in the bar and doesn’t care if it’s too early for a whiskey. Then, he gets an unexpected call from someone he had known a long time ago: his ex-girlfriend, Katherine Brunt (Katee Sackhoff), who also happens to be his former boss working for the government agency.
We learn that Reyes is a disgraced Secret Service operative, and after spending years in exile, Brunt needs him badly to accomplish a mission. He will be given a U.S. passport and a chance for redemption, which he reluctantly agrees to for the mission to locate the elusive, most wanted cyber terrorist, nicknamed the Ghost. His target happens to be on the plane en route from Bangkok to San Francisco. That is where Reyes needs to be onboard, identify and bring the Ghost back alive.
Soon, it’s like a plane version of Bullet Train since the flight has plenty of passengers, who are hired assassins from different companies. These assassins are also looking for the Ghost, making Reyes’ job a lot more complicated than it already is. Second-unit director James Madigan, whose credits range from G.I. Joe: Retaliation to The Meg and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, is calling the shots for the first time as a feature-length director. It’s difficult not to see that Madigan borrows the directorial playbook inspired by David Leitch’s action-comedy tropes and some John Wick vibe thrown in as well.
The movie benefits from a reasonably lean 97-minute running time, even though it’s all familiar stuff with a barrage of hit-or-miss broad humour. Again, it’s hard to picture Hartnett going all Brad Pitt or Keanu Reeves fighting and shooting bad guys here. And yet, he does a better-than-expected job pulling off the action role convincingly. His character even reminds me of how Bruce Willis would play in the 90s, minus the martial arts angle, especially given the disgraced role working for the law enforcement agency seen in The Last Boy Scout and Striking Distance.
The fight choreography may lack the same distinct style of John Wick movies or even anything that David Leitch directed. But props still go to Madigan for pumping up enough visceral, go-for-broke action set pieces taking place within the confines of a plane. A commercial airliner, to be exact, while incorporating some creative kills along the way.
This includes everything from a broken wine glass rammed through the eye, to a plane seatbelt for strangling an enemy and not to forget, a bloody chainsaw fight in the third act. And I mean, bloody as in capital “B” as Hartnett uses it against the assassins charging from different directions, albeit in CG blood effects. Think of them as a slasher version of an action comedy, and you probably get the idea here.
Madigan also brings out the best in Hartnett, whose committed performance as a reluctant ex-operative trying to get his job done, even if he tends to get sloppy at times. He’s entertaining to watch here, but the movie equally gets a boost from the game supporting cast, notably Katee Sackhoff as the no-nonsense agency boss Katherine Brunt and Charithra Chandran as the flight attendant, who finds herself caught in the middle of the mess. The latter also shares a fun, love-hate chemistry with Hartnett’s Reyes. Fight or Flight ends with a hint of a sequel, and if it happens, I can’t wait to see what James Madigan has in store.
