Review: Josh Hartnett crashes and burns in weak, empty ‘Fight or Flight'
It must be difficult deciding whether to star in a movie as bad as 'Fight or Flight.' On the one hand, you're being asked to make a movie, and that's a good thing. There's the money to consider, plus the sheer fun of working with people on a project and anticipating its release and reception. On the other hand, there's the near certainty of embarrassment.
Unfortunately for Josh Hartnett, he made the wrong choice. A script like this one makes nobody look good. 'Fight or Flight' is also the first feature film of director James Madigan. To lend your talents to a bad script and a first-time director is tantamount to announcing either that you have no sense or no better offers, or both. It's not a career enhancer.
But Hartnett does do the movie some good. He takes a film that could have been horrible and makes it merely lousy — a subtle distinction, but it matters if you're stuck watching it.
Hartnett plays Lucas, who used to work for the CIA and now is stuck in Bangkok, where he doesn't do much other than drink. His ex-girlfriend, Katherine (Katee Sackhoff), also a government operative, offers him a chance at redemption in the form of a job: He is to get on a plane from Bangkok to San Francisco and make sure that a mysterious entity known as The Ghost arrives alive.
No one knows what The Ghost looks like, so Lucas has to improvise. He also has to look out because half the passengers want to kill The Ghost and that same half wants to kill him, too.
But right away this movie is in trouble. The opening conversations in 'Fight or Flight' consist entirely of hostile banter between Lucas and Katherine, but the audience has no investment at all in their relationship. And the dialogue is so amateurish that we don't believe in it anyway.
What we want to know are the stakes. That is, why do we need to care if Lucas brings The Ghost to safety? Why should that matter to us? The movie delays answering those questions for about three-quarters of its running time. But by that time, it's too late and done too clumsily for it to matter.
The film just runs counter to the way action movies are supposed to work: The first job is to make the audience care. Their second job is to escalate the action so that it gradually builds in intensity, to the point that the tension becomes almost unbearable.
'Fight or Flight' does exactly the reverse. The violence gets cranked up to 11 after about 30 minutes, before we have anything resembling a rooting interest, and the violence stays there for most of the remaining hour. None of it has impact. It's just empty spectacle that becomes monotonous long before the halfway point.
To hold the audience, it tries humor as a last resort. Apparently, we're to understand that the sight of some characters getting killed is supposed to be funny, while the sight of others being murdered is supposed to be sad. Overall, there's an impression that something is being made fun of, but we never quite know what it is, until we realize: 'Fight or Flight' is making fun of itself, and maybe of the audience, too, for watching it.
Hartnett is naturally engaging, and one can see why, with the movie plummeting to earth, the filmmakers might decide to pull the humor ripcord. But here it smells of desperation.
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Famous chef Julia Child worked for the same organization before becoming famous, with her most notable job being to create "cakes" that were used as shark repellant. And Cary Grant reportedly spied on people in Hollywood to find Nazi sympathizers, including the German-born Count Kurt von Haugwitz-Hardenberg-Reventlow, who had married heiress Barbara Woolworth Hutton. Grant actually ended up marrying the heiress after she separated from her husband. Also during WWII, Audrey Hepburn (as a child) used to perform at secret concerts in the Netherlands to raise money for the Dutch resistance, risking discovery and punishment from Germans. Oh, and BTW, guess who was allegedly a Nazi informant? Coco Chanel. During World War II, Coco Chanel was named as a Nazi informant by friend Vera Bate (who herself confessed to being a German agent). The French government arrested Chanel, who had several ties with Nazi intelligence organization Abwehr and its members. 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After putting her daughter to bed, Christie (who was aware her husband was having an affair), drove off and her car was later found abandoned, hanging over the edge of a pit. She had left three letters behind, one to her brother-in-law claiming she had gone to a spa, another to her secretary with "scheduling details," and a third to her husband, who never revealed what the letter said. To find her, the police dredged a lake, brought in dogs, enlisted the help of over 10,000 people, and even looked to her novels for clues. She was eventually found at a spa, like she had told her brother-in-law — except according to her husband, she no longer remembered who she was or recognized him. She had checked in under his mistress' name. In the only time Christie ever spoke of it, she admitted to considering driving into the pit her car was found by, and hitting her head — this, accompanied by the trauma of her husband cheating and her mother dying, led to memory loss. 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Her housekeeper, Eunice Murray, who was there all day and night and was the one to find her dead, later claimed Robert had visited and they'd fought. When Murray found Marilyn dead around 3:30 a.m., she was reportedly holding her phone, and then-LA chief of detectives Thad Brown reportedly claimed she was found with a crumpled-up piece of paper with the number for the White House on it. Besides her connections to the Kennedys, there were other suspicious details around Monroe's death. Murray initially called Monroe's psychiatrist, Dr. Greenson, who called the doctor who had prescribed the pills, Dr. Engelberg, before calling the police. The police did not arrive for close to an hour after Murray first saw Monroe's body. Lawford later claimed that he'd heard about her death at 1:30 a.m. The wife of Monroe's press relations manager Arthur Jacobs also later claimed that her husband had received the call that Marilyn was dead at 10:30. Natalie Wood, who starred in a number of films including West Side Story, Rebel Without a Cause, and Gypsy, also died under extremely mysterious circumstances. The 43-year-old was with her husband Robert Wagner on his boat on a weekend vacation from filming Brainstorm when she drowned. According to Wagner himself (though he initially denied this), he and Wood argued, and then he went to bed without her. The next morning, her body was found a mile away. Wood had been drinking, and it's possible her death was an accident, but she was found with bruises that could mean she was attacked. Nearby witnesses had heard a woman scream. The captain of the boat, Dennis Davern, allegedly drunkenly confessed to Wood's sister years later that he'd seen Wagner push Wood, who then fell overboard, and that Wagner refused to rescue this is unconfirmed. Wagner has denied he had anything to do with Wood's death. 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