Josh Hartnett is having a bit of a career renaissance, with a great performance in the best picture winning Oppenheimer and a fun lead role in M. Night Shyamalan's Trap. Now he's back in a quirky leading role, this time in James Madigan's directorial debut Fight or Flight.
Coming from two of the producers behind the John Wick franchise, and featuring a premise eerily similar to the very fun Bullet Train, I had some decent hopes for this. The trailer felt pretty silly but I'm very much here for this new phase of Josh Hartnett's career. Sadly this didn't quite win me over. The film follows Hartnett as Lucas, a former agent exiled in Bangkok who is put on a plane to San Francisco in a desperate attempt hunt down an elusive target called the Ghost. The only problem? They have no clue who the Ghost is or what they look like. Oh, and the majority of people on the plane are also trying to take them out to collect a bounty.
I'll start with the positives, and Hartnett is no doubt one of them. His character is a former agent that has resorted to a life of drinking and running from his problems, making him a great flawed lead. His performance is unhinged, and had this been a film that played things more serious it wouldn't have worked, but this is very much an action comedy so his over the top antics fit right in with the tone Madigan creates. Charithra Chandran probably has the next most screen time, and I thought she was a lot of fun as well, bringing a youthful energy in contrast to Hartnett as a drunken ex-agent. The action is also pretty spectacular from a choreography standpoint. The fight scenes are brutal and at times gory as all hell, and despite the film taking place almost entirely on an airplane, the methods of brutality are constantly evolving to keep anything from feeling stale. The design of the plane also helps this a lot, with enough detail to make up for the limited setting.
While the choreography of the fight scenes is magnificent, it is sadly undercut by the sound mix. The sound design isn't something I would usually harp on, but it really limited how much I enjoyed this one. When I'm seeing an action movie in theatres I want it to be loud, I want the hits to echo through the room so we as an audience can feel the intensity. Despite the action being pretty damn intense, the sound design feels constantly dulled, thus cutting the immersion into the fight scenes. Sometimes the music choice plays a part in this, but really it just feels like the sound effects are mellowed out which really disappointed me.
I didn't mind the narrative, but it did feel like it was throwing a lot of things on the board and hoping they all worked. There are plot points that aren't drawn out nearly enough, serious ideas that are nodded to but don't fit the tone, and character development given through blatant exposition rather than creative storytelling. You can very much just go into this not caring about the story though, and watching it sorely for the fight scenes is probably the best way to go about it. I really wanted to love this, and while I got some enjoyment out of it, especially in Josh Hartnett's performance, I ultimately left the theatre a bit disappointed. 2.5/5
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