Think ‘John Wick’ meets ‘Con Air’—Josh Hartnett’s airborne actioner is bloody, bonkers and way more fun than it should be
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Who might have guessed that the sleeper hit of the spring 2025 film-going season was going to be an action film fronted by a wispy-bearded, bleached blonde Josh Hartnett, playing a rogue CIA agent seeking an international assassin nicknamed Ghost aboard a massive, double-decker airplane?
I’d say it’s “John Wick” on a plane, and it’s so completely bat shit and blissfully heavy metal that the description fits it to a tee. Hartnett, who leaped to stardom in the late ’90s and early aughts in such films as “Halloween H20: 20 Years Later” (1997), “The Faculty” (1998), “Pearl Harbor” (2001) and “Black Hawk Down” (2001) slid into the margins for a while and then got a bump from Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” (2023) and (less so, but still) M. Night Shyamalan’s “Trap” (2024).
So what is he doing in “Fight or Flight,” a slightly cheesy international production shot at Kraft Studio, Budapest, and scripted by Brooks McLaren (“How It Ends”) and newcomer D.J. Cotrona? Maybe Hartnett and director James Madigan (TV’s “Runaways”) hit it off. The screenplay is full of the usual canned cloak-and-dagger, pseudo-military, high-tech jargon. It exists to get a drunken, baggage-free rogue agent Lucas Reyes (Hartnett) aboard the film’s biggest prop (and Hartnett’s real costar), an Airbus A380, the largest passenger airliner in the world (exteriors were shot at Budapest’s Ferenc Liszt International Airport). The A380 is powered by four Rolls-Royce engines, can carry over 850 passengers, and boasts wider seats, wider cabins, more headroom, and cavernous cargo space.
Director Madigan and cinematographer Matt Flannery, who shot Gareth Evans’ great “The Raid: Redemption” and “The Raid II” and just shot “Havoc” with Tom Hardy, make the most of the concept. Yes, that is a chainsaw thrown down an airplane aisle by a flight attendant that you see before we flash to “12 Hours Earlier” (I hate these gratuitous time shifts). “Off grid” Reyes is on the run in a Thailand dive bar drinking off his hangover before being contacted by his desperate ex, a high-powered spook (Katee Sackhoff) because only he can get aboard a flight out of Bangkok Airport in time to catch the notorious killer. However, no one knows what “black hat terrorist” (Oy!) Ghost looks like (how they know Ghost is even boarding escaped me, and I did not care).
Co-screenwriter McLaren is at work on a “Rambo” TV series (big surprise). On board, Reyes finds himself in first class (above him on the top floor is the “diamond elite class”). Seated beside him is an entertainer named Cayenne (an outstanding Marko Zaror, “John Wick: Chapter 4”), who turns out to be one of the many murderers on board the flight, also looking to kill Ghost (Holy “Con Air”). You’ve heard of “Snakes on a Plane.” Now, the snakes are professional killers. Somehow, Reyes stays alive. Gunplay is at a minimum because, well, they’re on a plane, and we know what happens (e.g., “Goldfinger”) when you shoot a hole in an airplane. What follows is a hand-to-hand fight to the death in the largest bathroom in an airplane ever, complete with a shower and a bathtub. Reyes will team up with two flight attendants, the surprisingly resourceful Isha (an excellent Charithra Chandran, TV’s “Bridgerton”) and a more timid fellow named Royce (a very good Danny Ashok, TV’s “C.B. Strike”). After several changes of bloody clothes, Hartnett plays much of the bone-breaking, knife-stabbing and slashing-style action scenes in a flight attendant outfit too small for him. He is a complete gas. John McClane of “Die Hard” finally meets his match in the wisecracking department. Was that the grandson of “Goldfinger”’s Oddjob that Reyes just dispatched to the bad-guy afterlife?
Yes, we have to address the issue of a white guy (Hartnett) dispatching dozens of (yes, bad guys and gals) of color? Well, more than a few of the baddies are white. A timely Luigi Mangione twist involves Ghost’s motive for blowing up an electronics factory.
The music played as backdrop runs the gamut from “The Girl from Ipanema” and “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” to Elvis Costello and The Clash. We haven’t seen a plane full of so many dead bodies since Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s skin-crawling 2014 streaming series “The Strain.” If it weren’t so gory, I’d say “Fight or Flight” is the perfect movie to watch on an airplane. Fly, fly away.
‘Fight or Flight’
Rating: R for strong bloody violence, language throughout and some drug material.
Cast: Josh Hartnett, Katee Sackhoff, Charithra Chandran
Director: James Madigan
Writers: Brooks McLaren, D.J. Cotrona
Running time: 101 minutes
Where to Watch: AMC Boston Common, Alamo Drafthouse Seaport, Liberty Tree Mall and other suburban theaters
Grade: B+
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