Film: Fight or Flight
Cast: Josh Hartnett, Katee Sackhoff, Marko Zaror, Julian Kostov, Charithra Chandran, JuJu Chan, Sanjeev Kohli, Rebecka Johnston
Director: James Madigan
Rating: 2/5
Runtime: 97 min
James Madigan’s feature-length directorial debut, “Fight or Flight,” is basically “Bullet train” in mid-air. It’s a challenging yarn, an actioner, set in an airplane, with assassins coming out of every nook and corner.
There’s growing chaos inside a Bangkok flight bound for San Francisco with all kinds of killers and targets going beserk. It’s hard to decipher the good guys from the bad because by the end there are so many dead bodies strewn across the aisle that you lose count.
A Visual effects expert, Director Madigan tries to lend some dark comedy to the ultra-violent film but it’s to no avail. The characters seem jumbled up and the gory excess doesn’t feel palatable. Screenwriters Brooks McLaren and D.J. Catrona fail to create a realistic template for all the action – instead they go in for excess and the resultant, while not exactly entertaining, is stylistically interesting.
The Ghost, a “blackhat terrorist” by the C.I.A., needs to be captured. Agent Hunter (Julian Kostov) picks up on The Ghost’s presence in Bangkok, and informs his superior, Brunt (Katee Sackhoff). She, in turn, assigns Lucas (Josh Hartnett), a former Secret Service agent stuck in Bangkok, the thankless task. Offered a chance to reclaim all that’s been lost, Lucas reluctantly accepts the mission and boards the flight to San Francisco.
On the plane, Lucas meets flight attendants Isha (Charithra Chandran) and Royce (Danny Ashok), and learns the brutal truth that almost everyone on board is after the same target, creating a free-for-all battle of mercenaries in mid-air.
The first act is fairly believable and is set up spiffily. Lucas agrees to find The Ghost, and looks forward to the vindication he was waiting two years for.
But the rest of “Fight or Flight” which takes place in the air, is far-fetched and clearly hallucinatory. Everyone appears to have a weapon in store and skillsets that seem almost unbelievable.
Madigan stages close-quarters combat, expanding on the antagonism as Lucas is pitted against unknowns who crop up at every stage. There’s hardly any respite as the violence escalates and the task of ferreting out The Ghost gets even more perilous.
“Fight or Flight” remains violent for most of its runtime, keeping bloody confrontations and body count incrementing steadily. Director James Madigan tries to stage the action with a rapid pace and a sense of visual style. But the outrageous hardcore action is not a great fit for the lighthearted anarchic tone.
The writing tries to verbally throw in some backstory to complicate matters but it hardly registers in the mayhem that ensues. The Ghost’s motivations and the presence of a super-computer get lost in the melee. Madigan concludes the picture with an orgy of ultra-violence, furiously delivered, but it doesn’t make much sense. The frequent bursts of physical aggression and wild comedy, fail to sustain as credible entertainment. The weak plot, and rote characters, fail to entertain or engage.
