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“Fight or Flight” is one of those movies that begins with the ending. In this case, the ending / beginning involves a throng of assassins on a jumbo jetliner engaged in various levels of physical combat spilling into the aisles and punctuated by a flight attendant hurling a revved-up chainsaw into the mix. If it seems absurd, well, by the time it comes back around again, trust me, it will seem even more absurd. That’s a compliment. Director James Madigan is charting the screenplay, of course, by Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona but he’s charting the screenplay in the spirit of leading man Josh Hartnett’s costume changes. Hartnett begins “Fight or Flight” in a Hawaiian shirt which gives way to slightly undersized pink strawberry milk t-shirt before maxing and relaxing in even more undersized airline pajamas. The tighter his clothes, the more frenetic the action.
Hartnett is Lucas Reyes, a disavowed secret service agent stuck in Bangkok with no passport who is given the chance to get home and have his record cleared by Katherine Brunt, head of some nefarious black ops agency. She needs him to board a commercial flight bound for San Francisco and locate an asset known only as The Ghost, the moniker illustrating how even this covert operation can’t discern their target’s identity. One guess if Lucas can. Trouble is, the two-story plane is filled to the brim with assassins who are after The Ghost too, eventually prompting Lucas and the enigma he is tracking to team up as a desperate measure to keep themselves alive even as events back on the ground suggest all is not quite as it seems.
Though “Fight or Flight” introduces us to a few flight attendants, including Isha, played by a game Charitha Chandran, you might still wish we saw this increasingly blood-splattered chaos from the point-of-view of a passenger who now has that blood splattered all over their lululemon travel pants. On the other hand, eschewing the viewpoint of passengers signals an intention to just sort of blithely transform this two-story jet into an airborne grindhouse. That has its drawbacks. At a certain point, these close-quartered battles can’t help but grow repetitive; airplane blueprints are limited, I get it, but that’s the template you set for yourself, man, so go exploring. The action scenes are better when they throw some additional ingredient into the mix, like Lucas’s apparent semi-imperviousness to horse tranquilizers, or the foreshadowed conclusion in which Lucas inadvertently imbibes toad serum as over-the-top violence gives way to surreal cartoon chaos. One macabre reveal managed the action-thriller ultimate and made me laugh out loud.
Hartnett made me laugh out loud too. It’s impressive, this mid-career turn, between this and “Trap” and some Guy Ritchie joints becoming something like Nu-Nic Cage. Granted, Cage always seems to be on toad serum, whether he is or not, and Hartnett’s vibe is kookier, less crazed. But it works for him, especially in “Fight or Flight,” like someone who’s been out in the sun too long, which in effect, Lucas has. Yet, for as much as the script disregards reality, the emergent backstories of Lucas and The Ghost want to let reality back in, to an almost uncomfortable degree, and that sometimes struggles to mesh with all the casual murder and mayhem. By the end, though, Hartnett had put the puzzle together for me, making me realize that a world like this one, it’s all a guy can do to keep from losing his mind.
