Josh Hartnett‘s 21st-century output always plays like he’s just thrilled to be there. Mind you, that’s a compliment; most young stars whose careers don’t quite reach AAA-list status tend to flame out, or retreat to the comfy confines of prestige television, where they can win an Emmy or two. But Hartnett’s recent comeback has been quite the sight to see, from his hot-scientist-with-glasses turn in “Oppenheimer” to his Bugs Bunny-adjacent turn as cinema’s most charming girldad/serial killer in Shyamalan’s “Trap.” James Madigan’s “Fight or Flight” carries few of the prior two’s prestige auspices—it’s a mid-budget riff on “Bullet Train,” after all—but meet it on its altitude, and it’s a bloody, funny good time.
The latest in a long line of action flicks that proudly touts “From A Producer of ‘John Wick'” on the poster, “Fight or Flight” kicks off in suitably “Deadpool”-y fashion: Johann Strauss’ “The Blue Danube Waltz” plays while a devastatingly over-the-top melee plays out in the confined cabin of a passenger airliner: There’s women in karate gis kicking ass, machine pistols blasting away, and finally, someone getting sucked out of a hole in the side of the plane. Smash cut to twelve hours earlier, and black-ops spook Katie (Katee Sackhoff, sporting a double-breasted blazer and a suitable glower to go with her slicked-back haircut) discovers that a high-value asset has boarded a plane leaving Bangkok. The only possible man they could deploy to retrieve her in time? Katie’s disheveled, mercenary ex Lucas (Hartnett), sporting a similar bleach-blonde/Hawaiian shirt getup and laconic attitude as Pitt in “Bullet Train,” in case the comparisons weren’t clear enough, who’s been drinking his life away after your typical job-gone-bad. Despite the dozens of axes to grind, Lucas’ scruples (and the chance to return from exile) get the better of him, and he reluctantly boards the plane to find this asset and guard her. Problem is, the rest of the plane is also filled with mercenaries looking to collect a heaping bounty on her.
It’s a simple premise, but strangely effective, as Madigan (who cut his teeth on second-unit work for action films like “Snake Eyes: GI Joe Origins” and “RED 2”) hits the ground running with one bonkers setpiece after another. The “Wick” parallels abound, but it also helps that the film is shot briskly by Matt Flannery, who’s been Gareth Evans’ house cinematographer since “The Raid: Redemption.” After that initial setpiece, the tone is set nicely with a “Non-Stop” esque dustup in a surprisingly spacious airplane bathroom—seems first class really has its perks—between Hartnett and “Fist of the Condor” legend Marko Zaror. From there, it’s a quest to find the asset (assisted by a game flight attendant with a secret played by Charithra Chandran) and keep her alive, as the cartoonishly endless plane serves up dozens of burly stuntmen to fling around and dispatch with all manner of flight-related implements. (If you hated airplane seatbelts now, wait till you see how they’re used here.)
“You’re stitching together a parachute as we fall from the sky,” Lucas grunts to Katie in one early exchange, and that turns out to be the freewheeling attitude co-writers Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona took to the film’s anarchic sense of humor. The script is no great shakes, especially once it sits down to lumber through the world-ending stakes these types of movies tend to have. But the jokes fly as fast as the punches, and land with greater rhythm or impact than the meta groaners of “Deadpool” and their like. It’s the smart kind of stupid, where mercenaries get killed by sticking them to the ceiling by a sprinkler spout in their brainpan, or Sackhoff’s character casually drops some CBD oil to calm down. It’s little touches like cutting from the bad guys having serious discussions to see their coworkers doing corporate yoga in the courtyard, or punctuating a man’s bludgeoning death by laptop to the Windows shutdown chime. Lucas’ resilience to being drugged: “I guess you can’t pickle a pickle.”
None of this plane holds together, of course, without Hartnett, who’s tapped into a delightful well of derangement between this and “Trap”; his Lucas is a burnt-out, devil-may-care drunken master in ways Pitt just couldn’t manage in his equivalent feature, and he acquits himself so admirably in the breathless action scenes. Seems Shyamalan and Madigan both picked up that it’s innately hilarious to turn the camera straight-on to a closeup of Hartnett’s face, let him grin like a Cheshire cat, and let him play. Here, though, he’s our reluctant goodie, and he battles both against bickering flight attendants and the pharmacy of sedatives and psychedelics that guide him from one setpiece to the next. In a vacuum, such cinematic anarchy could get repetitive and tiring. Hartnett guides us through to a soft landing, like Sully Sullenberger with a chainsaw.
