FIGHT OR FLIGHT - Mark Reviews Movies

Fight or Flight, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 8, 2025

Fight or Flight puts a man capable of much violence but with a bit of a conscience on a plane filled with other people capable of just as much violence but without the scruples. To put it more plainly, director James Madigan's feature debut is about a lot of bloody killing within the cramped confines of a very big plane.

The idea is undeniably a fun one, and the filmmakers here don't let anything like character development, a plot that needs to be summarized in more than a single sentence, or basic logic get in the way of the movie's singular purpose. That's to offer as much fighting as possible, using things that one might not expect to be standard-issue for a commercial airliner or to be carried in luggage past airport security, with as little rationalization for it to happen. It's entertaining for a bit, especially because Josh Hartnett plays our anti-hero with an amusing degree of befuddled annoyance for the increasing difficulties of his mission, but once we realize the movie has one note to play over and over again, the repetition becomes a burden.

Harnett plays Lucas Reyes, a former Secret Service agent who's currently in hiding in Bangkok after some nasty business that got him fired and targeted for retribution by some powerful people. He just happens to be the only asset in the city known to Katherine Brunt (Katee Sackhoff), the head of some shadowy agency. A notorious hacker known as "the Ghost," whose real name and face are unknown to just about everyone in the world, has struck a factory in Thailand.

With the Ghost heading to the local international airport, Katherine decides to call in Lucas' services. If he captures the target and brings the hacker alive to the United States, she'll ensure that Lucas can return to a normal life. Since he spends his days drunk and sleeping on the streets and in debt to local gangs who want to be repaid, Lucas really doesn't have much of an option.

To be clear, all of this is played with a smirk, from the bickering agents at the mysterious agency (The revelation of the group's allegiance is a very funny one) to Lucas' down and desperate way of doing just about everything. Once he gets on the double-decker plane with an assortment of high-class amenities, Lucas soon realizes he's not the only person on board searching for the Ghost, and the only difference between him and those hunters is that he wants to take the hacker alive. Everyone else has been ordered to kill the target and don't have a problem killing Lucas if he gets in their way.

To explain more of the plot would be pointless, because this is all there is to it, really. Lucas starts trying to determine the identity of the Ghost and, once he does find the hacker hiding in plain sight, to protect his target, while each and every other person on the flight could be a highly trained assassin. It's a good-enough excuse for a near-constant stream of action sequences, and screenwriters Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona treat the premise as little else.

Such a setup leaves us with only one way to view the successes or shortcomings of the movie: Is the action worthwhile? To some extent, it is. Madigan makes fine use of the constricted and limiting spaces within the plane, such as during an early brawl in a relatively spacious first-class bathroom. Lucas, who still has a hangover from the night before and keeps drinking bottles of whatever he can find to nurse it, has to deal with one of those killers, who tosses Lucas to and fro within the room before our guy puts a quick but accidental end to him.

Eventually, Lucas gains the trust of a pair of flight attendants, Isha (Charithra Chandran) and Royce (Danny Ashok), who help him keep an eye out for people looking sinister or acting in a menacing way, but that's mostly irrelevant. The assassins keep coming, ambushing Lucas in the bar area, coming at him with a bunch of hidden (the mouthpiece of a clarinet turned into a deadly tool, for example) or more practical (like pistols and automatic firearms that some of these killers have kept in their carry-on luggage) weapons. It's kind of strange that every compartment of the plane seems to be soundproof, but then again, it's not as if Madigan ever provides a sense of the limited layout of the aircraft. Like the screenplay, the plane seems constructed in such a way that the action can keep coming but stays confined to a single, self-contained sequence.

Lucas does get some more help, mainly from a trio of women monks who agree with the Ghost's philosophy and an unexplained chainsaw that conveniently comes in handy to literally disarm some thugs. Even so, there's not much variety in the action or the shaky way Madigan shoots and the almost-too-coordinated way he stages it in Fight or Flight. The increasingly unconvincing and monotonous nature of the action gradually diminishes the momentum this exercise in nearly non-stop violence. We can accept that there's little to nothing more to the movie than its action, but as soon as that element starts to stumble, it means there's little to nothing left to appreciate in the movie.

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