Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Mel Gibson’s Flight Risk is not nearly as grand a project as you might expect from one of Donald Trump’s three newly appointed “ambassadors to Hollywood”, their mission to bring back business to “a great but very troubled place”. This airborne action thriller is hardly on the grandiose level of previous Gibson directing projects such as The Passion of the Christ or Apocalypto; perhaps he has decided to leave the truly momentous auteur statements to fellow emissary Sylvester Stallone.One thing that Flight Risk has going for it is no-nonsense economy, of which Elon Musk’s new DOGE efficiency department would surely approve: it’s basically three people in a small aircraft, and it’s only 91 minutes long. Michelle Dockery plays a US Marshal dispatched to Alaska to retrieve a runaway accountant (Topher Grace) and bring him back south to testify against a mob boss. Once they board their hired plane, however, it soon becomes clear that the pilot (Mark Wahlberg), seemingly a good ol’ boy dispatching homespun bonhomie, is not all he seems. Neither is his hairline — the film’s one surprise, although a completely gratuitous one.Grace puts his heart into it as a constantly blabbing, permanently frazzled wiseacre, and Dockery is more than solid as a generic tough-cookie-with-troubled-back-story. But the film is mainly a vehicle for Wahlberg, gurning, sneering and chomping at the bit in a Jack Nicholson impersonation that’s barely on a Stars in Their Eyes level.Flight Risk is written by Jared Rosenberg, although you suspect that Gibson himself may have done a pass on the dialogue, since Wahlberg’s bilious sexual innuendo does carry echoes of some of the director’s more dubious past comments.There are a few mildly ingenious twists and contrivances, but overall, it’s all cynically functional, hair’s-breadth mid-air escapes and all.★★☆☆☆In cinemas from January 24
