Title: Fight or Flight
Describe This Movie In One Full Metal Jacket Quote:
PVT. JOKER: I wanted to meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture, and kill them.
Brief Plot Synopsis: Air travel keeps getting worse.
Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: 2 Caspers out of 5.
Tagline: “From the producers of John Wick.”
Better Tagline: “Sicarios on a plane”
Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: When ex-Secret Service agent Lucas Reyes (Josh Hartnett) is understandably annoyed when he gets a call from his former boss (Katee Sackhoff). After all, she’s the reason he’s been hiding out in Bangkok for the last two years. However, she offers Reyes a clean slate if he apprehends a rogue criminal named “Ghost” who’s just boarded a flight from Thailand to San Francisco. One minor problem: the plane is packed with assassins who are all after the same target.
“Critical” Analysis: Lots of people (wrongly, in my opinion) wrote off “heartthrob era” Josh Hartnett back in the day. Hollywood was clearly trying to slot him into hunkier leading man roles (The Faculty, Black Hawk Down, Pearl Harbor), and to hear Hartnett himself on the matter, he wasn’t one hundred percent on board with that. His own discomfort in some of those roles may have exacerbated negative perceptions of those movies.
It’s why he (wisely) turned down the role of Superman in what was then Brett Ratner’s project and appeared in smaller and/or Guy Ritchie productions before returning in a big way in Oppenheimer and toplining M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap. Fight or Flight is his second straight leading man role since then, and it showcases Hartnett’s comedy chops and charisma even if the end product doesn’t quite gel.
Fight or Flight really leans into that “from the producers of John Wick” stuff, even going so far as to refer to “the Ghost” as “the Boogeyman” early on. But then, Ghost isn’t the protagonist. That’d be Reyes, who isn’t so much the High Table’s least favorite hitman as he is Joe Hallenbeck from The Last Boy Scout. Like Hallenbeck, Reyes is a burned out ex-Secret Service agent (also fired for beating up the guy he was detailed to protect) whose audience introduction is also a kid trying to rob him while he’s passed out.
Thankfully, director James Madigan is more interested in the ludicrous underpinnings of the plot and not so much the main character’s existential angst, which is also played for laughs (he also avoids LBC’s ugly misogyny).The Ghost’s identity is revealed pretty early on, and the second and third acts are how they and Reyes have to team up for survival against a smorgasbord of assassins.
Most of what follows is familiar if you’ve seen The Raid or Bullet Train or Free Fire or … you get the idea. An international assortment of hitmen and women battle Reyes in the unfriendly confines of a jetliner. The results are sometimes surprisingly gory, though cartoonishly so, like a bloodier Looney Tunes short. Madigan also provides some genuine laugh out loud moments, abetted by Hartnett’s hangdog charisma. The actor builds on being one of the (okay, only) highlights of last year’s Trap by turning in an accomplished comedic performance, also sharing great chemistry with Charithra Chandran, who plays flight attendant Isha.
Where things ultimately bog down for Madigan and company is the aforementioned repetition and the ending, which tips Fight or Flight over from shoot-’em-up/fisticuffs to needless hallucinatory weirdness (stay away from animal tranquilizers, kids). The ending, which nakedly screams “give us a sequel!”, also doesn’t land.
I’ve been rooting for Hartnett ever since he made a comeback of sorts in Penny Dreadful, and while Fight or Flight is largely ridiculous and offers a few punch-ups to action choreography we’ve mostly seen before, at least the Joshaissance is fun to see while it lasts.
Fight or Flight is in theaters today.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
