Call it “Chainsaws on a Plane,” and also you received’t be far off the mark.
Of course, to be completely correct, there’s just one power-driven chopping instrument put to deadly use in “Fight or Flight,” director James Madigan’s outrageously and sometimes uproariously over-the-top action-comedy that concocts a cut-and-paste raise from “Bullet Train,” then dials it as much as 11 throughout a Transpacific flight on a humongous passenger airplane.
But there are scads of different sharp objects employed as armaments — together with sprinkler spouts and shards of wineglasses — together with knives, swords, drug-laced darts and even seatbelt buckles, to say nothing of such conventional artillery as Glocks and assault weapons. (No snakes, nonetheless.) If you end up sometimes questioning how so many aspiring assassins managed to get a lot of these items previous airport safety, particularly after you’ve been busted for making an attempt to board a home flight with a bottle of shampoo in your carry-on baggage, nicely, you simply may be a tad too logical to completely respect the full-bore lunacy of “Fight or Flight.”
The movie begins with an ultra-violent flashforward that serves as each a due-diligence warning and a coming sights trailer. We see in a slo-mo sequence with a wink-wink “Blue Danube Waltz” soundtrack dozens of parents in livid altercations with one another, throwing punches and firing weapons, kung-fu preventing and, sure, tossing a chainsaw — till one not-so-innocent bystander is sucked out of an enormous gap within the aspect of the airplane.
But in case you pay attention intently, you possibly can nearly hear Madigan promising: “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”
Things relax a bit — briefly, a minimum of — as a “12 Hours Earlier” title seems on display screen, and we’re quickly launched to Lucas Reyes (Josh Hartnett, impressively sport and grungy), an American ex-pat who appears to be like very very like one thing the cat dragged in, reconsidered and dragged again outdoors. He’s slumped over within the backseat in a motorized pedicab on a Bangkok again road, clad in what we will solely assume are the identical cargo pants and Hawaiian shirt he has worn for, oh, perhaps per week or so. Just in case we fail to understand the depth of his down-and-out standing after he guzzles the final contents of a whiskey bottle for breakfast, he trundles over to a close-by bar for lunch.
“If I die in your bar,” Reyes tells the disapproving proprietor, “you can sell my organs to pay my tab.” The proprietor shakes her head disapprovingly, then responds: “I don’t think they’re worth what they used to be.”
Turns out Reyes is our previous buddy, the bunt-out, plummeted-from-grace ex-agent (on this case, a former Secret Service operative) who’s consuming his method via an prolonged exile after a disastrous mission, and is in no explicit hurry to sober up and return house. He is roused from his self-destructive debauchery solely when he receives a name from the supervisor at some unnamed company, Katherine Brunt (Katee Sackhoff, sternly seductive), who simply occurs to be his former lover.
Brunt presents Reyes a shot at redemption — together with an enormous paycheck, a brand new passport, and elimination from the U.S. No Fly List — if he agrees to board a jumbo-sized passenger airplane simply hours away from take-off to San Francisco. His not possible mission: find “the Ghost,” a mysterious “black hat terrorist” believed to be one of many of the passengers. Mind you, nobody has any thought what the terrorist appears to be like like, and it’s fairly doggone sure they don’t want to be positioned. But, hey, Brunt’s folks know the Ghost has just lately been wounded, and is touring alone, in order that they shouldn’t be too exhausting to search out. And moreover, Reyes doesn’t must kill the Ghost — simply carry them again alive.
Of course, none of this goes in keeping with plan.
The first complication arises when a fellow passenger laces Reyes’ drink with a sedative, then carries him to the luxury-class toilet to complete him off. Instead, a struggle ensues, since Reyes is much from unconscious: Long-term heavy consuming evidently has made him proof against nearly something in need of a bullet to the pinnacle. (“I guess you can’t pickle a pickle,” he says, marveling at his personal sturdiness.) Indeed, after exterminating his would-be killer, he merely forces himself to throw up the sedative by gulping a bottle of liquid hand cleaning soap. Then he’s again on his ft, albeit shakily.
Reyes’ borderline preternatural resilience rapidly turns into an amusing working gag in a film that performs like probably the most splatterific Looney Tunes cartoon ever made. And it’s an excellent factor our hero is extra indestructible than Wile E. Coyote, since he rapidly learns that (a) the whole airplane is crammed with assassins keen to gather a bounty on the Ghost, and (b) those self same assassins have been tipped off to what he appears to be like like.
Aided solely by a surprisingly small workers of flight attendants that features the plucky Isha (Charithra Chandran) and the anxious Royce (Danny Ashok), Reyes engages in a steadily escalating sequence of mortal fight dustups all around the airliner, from the first-class higher degree to the cargo maintain, whereas passengers who aren’t employed killers duck and canopy, or wind up as collateral injury.
There are instances when it appears Madigan and screenwriters Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona are merely making issues up as they go alongside, merely offering rudimentary linkage from one jaw-dropping, ultra-kinetic motion set piece to the following. Gradually, nonetheless, a technique to their insanity emerges, particularly once we lastly be taught simply what group the stern-faced Brunt is working for.
The mayhem is so cartoonish that it elicits much more laughs than gasps. But there are a couple of non-violent punchlines within the combine as nicely. A pleasant contact: The pilots, who know what’s occurring behind their locked cockpit door, think about they’ll be hailed as heroes like Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger in the event that they handle to land the airplane.
But wait, there’s extra: At one level, assassins line up just like the slappers in “Airplane!” to take a crack at their goal. At one other level, Reyes over-medicates with adrenaline, to the purpose of hallucinating that the Ghost’s backup trio of kimono-clad bodyguards are ladies warriors on mortgage from a classic Shaw Brothers martial arts epic.
Ultimately, it’s extraordinarily uncertain that any of this may work almost in addition to it does with out Hartnett on the heart of the storm, anchoring the bloody chaos and producing rooting curiosity with a efficiency outlined by propulsive physicality, industrial-strength enthusiasm and an indefatigable willingness, even eagerness, to repeatedly make himself the butt of the joke.
One can be hard-pressed to recall one other latest occasion of an actor expressing such sheer pleasure in what he’s doing on display screen. Maybe Hartnett is celebrating his present profession comeback, or perhaps he’s simply excessive on the joys of being immersed in such wire-to-wire pandemonium. Either method, Harnett’s elation is marvelous to behold — and extremely contagious.
