Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

Fight or Flight is dumb as shit, and it’s also a blast. Because you know what? This is actually a movie with integrity. It knows what it is, it tells you what it is, and then delivers exactly what it promises. There are no pretenses here, and that is precisely what makes a movie like this work.

In less sensible hands, there would be an attempt to shoehorn some kind of unearned empathy for the characters, some sense of earnestness or wholesome sweetness—a dad just trying to show up for his little girl, or whatever. Nobody’s here for that shit! This is something first-time feature director James Madigan understands. Madigon previously worked for many years on visual effects, for the likes of Iorn Man 2 or Bill & Ted Face the Music. He’s also worked as Second Unit or Assistant Director, on films like Insurgent and The Meg. It would be tempting to say that he’s being forced to slum it here with his first feature directorial gig, except that clearly given the right opportunity, this guy knows how to deliver.

He’s also got the perfect star in Josh Hartnett, now starring in two films in as many years that qualify as slightly-elevated trash—the other one being Trap, the M. Night Shyamalan film that has its own dumb charms but ultimately fails to live up to its own promise. Fight or Flight is actually a better movie, never bothering with misguided plot turns and instead staying the course on its own pulpiness.

To be clear, there are definite lulls in Fight or Flight. But they are reliably brief, as this movie never wastes time getting to the delightfully ridiculous. Lucas (Hartnett) is a disgraced FBI agent being given a chance at redemption when he is the only person close enough to follow an elusive criminal onto a plane from Bangkok to San Francisco. Here’s the fun twist on the premise, something thankfully established early on so it’s never used as a predictable “reveal”—the “ghost,” as the elusive person is called, has a $10 million bounty on their head, and when their flight itinerary is leaked, we wind up with a large plane packed with assassins.

Who needs snakes? Hitmen (and hitwomen) will do just fine. In fact, there’s a line between straight up garbage and well-crafted trash. Fight or Flight works because it operates on its own terms, as opposed to pre-emotive fan service. The more ridiculous it got, the more fun I had—even when assassins found weapons that would never actually make their way on such a plane. I guess in some cases having characters search luggage in the cargo hold is a convenient trick. One particular weapon, which I won’t spoil even though the trailer does, effectively tops everything seen up to that point, ratcheting up the mayhem exponentially.

Fight or Flight frequently cuts back to predictably dubious agents on the ground, played by Kate Sackhoff and Julian Kostov, who are a bit wasted here. On the plane, British-Indian actor Charithra Chandran is a relative standout in a key role, ultimately holding her own in all of the in-flight hand-to-hand combat that would never really work in the confines of an airplane mid-flight. But who cares? No one is coming to a movie like this for plausibility. You want to see gushing bloodshed and dismemberment, which Fight or Flight has in spades. As well as many other weapons.

I giggled my way through this movie, tickled pink at its cartoon violence, the airplane setting giving it a seemingly novel spin akin to the much higher-profile 2022 film Bullet Train—but without the pointless indulgence in so-called character development. Fight or Flight has a perfectly respectable runtime of 102 minutes, because it knows we have no need to know that much about who these characters are. By the end, the script does throw in some token morality about slave labor used to manufacture our electronics, a plot concept so undercooked it’s barely noticeable. At least it’s heavily loaded with clever takes on implausible fight choreography, the only thing any of us have come here for, and which the crew is happy to serve.

Overall: B