The opening of James Madigan’s Fight or Flight shows us a moment from the climax of the film, in which a plane full of keen-to-kill assassins have a big, bloody, chaotic melee, resulting in a hole being blown in the fuselage. That tease writes a check for mayhem that the rest of the film leading up to that moment can’t cash except in fits and starts.
Fight or Flight proper begins with Lucas Reyes (Hartnett), an ex-Secret Service agent, getting pulled out of a drunken stupor by his former government handlers to hunt down a “blackhat terrorist” hiding in plain sight on a flight out of Thailand. Filmmakers could execute on that premise by playing it as serious as a heart attack, or they could send the film careening off into hyperkinetic wackyland. Fight or Flight tries both, and it’s a mess as a result.
For whatever it’s worth, the film’s chaotic streak is its strongest attribute, if for no other reason than it’s the pocket that Hartnett is operating in. Fresh off his tightrope-walking performance in M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, there isn’t a single moment that the actor doesn’t infuse with a loopy, delirious Daffy Duck-like energy. This is a man who’d rather be doing anything else but taking this job, and he decides very early on, during an apoplectic phone call with his handler (Katee Sackhoff), that he’s going to make that everyone else’s problem.
If the remainder of Madigan’s film was able to consistently match Hartnett’s freak, we’d be looking at a new action-comedy classic. But it doesn’t. The seriousness of the plot, as scripted by Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona, intrudes on the fun of the performance early and often, and once Lucas identifies the terrorist, Fight or Flight can’t find a consistent lane to stay in.
Dramatic moments create tonal stutters that prevent the film from becoming the unhinged Looney Tune that it wants to be. Wilder elements are introduced—a pair of female shaolin nuns, the discovery of just how many assassins are on board the plane—but despite some flashes of excellent fight choreography, the escalation of stakes is more haphazard than ecstatic. By the time we reach the climactic moment from the intro, this flight is already out of fuel.
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