‘Fight or Flight:’ Kind of dumb (in a fun way)

Josh Hartnett in Fight or Flight Photo provided by Vertical 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 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 fleetly 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 briskly 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 ruling body 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 regime control room is a slog disrupting the pacing and vigor 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 preponderance of the bounty hunters introduced are nameless faceless killers there are a minimal 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 indeed 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 t te- -t te when the fights get bigger the vitality 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 particular 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 tough to take them seriously when the rest of the film is so unruly For however multiple flaws Fight or Flight has however Hartnett manages to hold everything together In the past insufficient 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 The post Fight or Flight Kind of dumb in a fun way appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta