This surprisingly frisky Sky Cinema release just beats Mel Gibson’s Flight Risk as early favourite for the year’s best action romp with a play on “flight” in its title. We have learned to run screaming from generic beat-’em-ups on streamers and satellite services, but, before you turn the page, let me just run this past you.
Some wretched terrorist nicknamed the Ghost is causing grief for the sort of glossy security service that exists only in the straight-to-streaming world. The angry boss (Katee Sackhoff) decides they need to call in a hardened renegade – a loose cannon, a lovable rogue – now retired to some seedy dive after breaking the rules once too often.
It’s Josh Hartnett as the Hawaiian shirt-coded Lucas Reyes – and you can bet he starts the day with a swift blast of something stronger than buttermilk. Aware the Ghost is on a plane to San Francisco, Lucas, arm twisted into compliance, accepts a false passport and joins him (or her) for the journey.
Here’s the problem. Nobody knows what the target looks like. Worse still, the plane is packed with fellow mercenaries equally eager to annihilate this mysterious wrecker of worlds. Great, right?
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To be brutally pedantic, Fight or Flight doesn’t really work as a title. He’s on the plane now. So he’s flying. What other option does he have bar fighting when business class is jammed with hardened psychopaths? Then again, Fight and Flight isn’t a thing.
Never mind that. James Madigan, hitherto a second-unit director, takes precisely the right attitude from the opening skirmish. This is cartoon violence at a level of savagery that might give Itchy & Scratchy pause for thought.
Let us just say that, even before the seat belt sign has gone off, we’ve encountered a hunk of scalp and brain matter kebabbed to a light fitting. Arms are snapped in two. A late appearance by a chainsaw (how did they get that past security?) is followed by something other than recreational forestry.
We are told that Hartnett is doing his own stunts; rocking back from the balletic mayhem, one is again reminded that he never quite got the crack at high-end action cinema he deserved. This is pure pulp, but it’s good, honest pulp that keeps in time with the backbeat throughout. Good support from Bridgerton’s Charithra Chandran. Not for the squeamish, though.
On Sky Cinema from Friday, February 28th
