Fight or Flight: A gleefully silly – and very bloody – airplane movie

Fight or Flight, which shares with Trap its star, Josh Hartnett, is neither a good-bad movie nor a bad-bad movie. It is something subtly different but often confused with those two categories: a gleefully silly movie that never hesitates to be exactly what it is.

The film finds Lucas Reyes (Hartnett) having hit the skids after losing his job as a Secret Service agent. He has nowhere to turn, until a former colleague named Katherine (Katee Sackhoff) offers him an opportunity that could redeem him. A shadowy figure and "high-value asset" known only as the Ghost is about to board a very long flight to San Francisco, and Reyes needs to figure out who the Ghost is, protect them, and escort them to the United States. As it turns out, the whole world has a bounty on the Ghost's head, and the flight details were leaked, so the plane is full of people who want to kill the Ghost — and kill Lucas, too. And so Lucas spends the whole flight having increasingly ridiculous fights to the death with various hired assassins.

That's the movie. There's a side story about something on the plane in a closed crate ... who knows, it's not important. There's also a back story with Lucas and Katherine, and that's not important either. What's important is that anything you can think of that can be found on an airplane is eventually used in an act of violence. Seatbelts? Yes. Overhead compartments? Yes. The ovens in the galley? Of course. The drink cart? Obviously.

This movie is very, very bloody, and it gets bloodier as it goes along. Eventually, Lucas fights every kind of menacing person you would find in any other movie: martial arts guys, a guy with a machine gun, some kind of European smooth-talker, even a lady with strange eyes who looks like she might have come from a sci-fi picture. He fights in pajamas, he fights in Vans, and he fights while drugged — twice! The only real allies he has on the plane are the flight crew, led by Isha (Charithra Chandran, who played Edwina on Bridgerton).

As Ronald Young, Jr. pointed out on our PCHH episode, there's a version of this film that's slightly more thoroughly written that makes a billion dollars at the box office worldwide. But there's also a version of it that, like Trap, tries too hard to be serious. There are films that combine this kind of over-the-top violence with a grim outlook that still manage to be highly entertaining — John Wick, for instance. But that's hard to do.

This is either a goofier John Wick or a much more skillful Sharknado, depending on how you want to think about it. Lest you think that's an insult: At the end of Sharknado, when a guy chainsaws his way out of a shark? That move is related to a long history of delightful B-movie gore, and if the rest of the movie had that level of vigor, they would have been cooking with gas.

At the center of Fight or Flight is Hartnett, who was super-hot as a young guy in the late '90s and early aughts, in The Faculty and Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down. He faded from view a bit until — at least for me — he showed up in Oppenheimer. Then he was quite good in an episode of Black Mirror, and in a role on The Bear, and he was the best thing about Trap. Here, although some of the promotion for the movie makes him look merely wild-eyed, he's very funny, combining "I'm too old for this" grouchiness with "well, I guess I have to fight another assassin" resignation. He's exactly tuned in to the tone of the movie, and unlike Trap, it doesn't undermine his weirdness with ponderousness.

Not a good-bad movie; not a bad-bad movie. Just the story of a man who, like all of us, wishes he could just relax on the plane without being interrupted by so many inconvenient strangers.