Fight or Flight movie review: Josh Hartnett brings the ‘josh' in glorified Ajay Devgn actioner

Indian Express

24-04-2025

The thing about movies that are easy to pitch is that they're also highly unoriginal. You could imagine the writers of Fight or Flight strolling into an executive's office and giving them an animated breakdown of the story, describing it as 'Speed meets Bullet Train', and promptly being given a green light. Directed by James Madigan and starring Josh Hartnett, Fight or Flight borrows liberally from B-movies past, struggling and failing to come up with something novel. It isn't a long movie, but it doesn't feel as short as its 90-minute run-time might suggest either.
Hartnett plays Lucas Reyes, a mercenary who is hiding out in Bangkok after a job gone wrong. He is awoken from a liquor-induced slumber one morning by his ex, who operates some sort of shady organisation dedicated to world peace or something. Lucas is instructed to hightail it to the airport and board a flight bound for San Francisco. Aboard the flight is a mysterious, high-value target known only as 'The Ghost'. Needless to say, Lucas isn't the only person after them.
He discovers mere moments after boarding the flight that virtually every other 'passenger' is an assassin of some kind, determined to identify and eliminate The Ghost. It's like when the High Table put out an open hit on John Wick at the end of the second movie. It became a free-for-all. But while the John Wick movies grew in scale with every passing instalment, Fight or Flight takes place entirely aboard a plane. This would push a brighter creative team to devise ingenious ways to keep the story moving, but the folks behind Fight or Flight fail to weaponise these restrictions to their advantage.
The Brad Pitt-starrer Bullet Train took off from the exact same premise, confining a cast-full of colourful assassins inside a high-speed Japanese locomotive. It made for a mildly diverting time at the movies, struggling to do justice not only to a star of Pitt's magnetism, but also old-school B-movies. Fight or Flight is an even smaller project, bound together by the most fragile of scripts. It takes off, so to speak, only when the plane does.
It doesn't take Lucas too long to identify The Ghost, but circumstances force them to team up. Allies are revealed to be adversaries, and adversaries are transformed into allies. Because the movie doesn't exactly need to flesh its characters out, it conveniently coasts by on autopilot. But, after a point, even a movie as ridiculous as this needs some sort of emotion to ground it. Hartnett is a committed performer; he projects 'has-been' really well on screen. But perhaps this has something to do with the comeback that he is trying to mount.
Lucas appears to be rather lackadaisical at the beginning of the movie, but it is soon revealed that his proactive sense of justice is what got him exiled to Bangkok in the first place. To be clear, he isn't an entirely amoral person. And this itch to do the right thing compels him to guide The Ghost towards safety. Fight or Flight is standard-issue fare, but it comes alive in the action scenes. Thankfully, they aren't edited to within an inch of their life, which is something that the Karan Johar-produced action film Kill was guilty of doing. That movie was geographically incomprehensible, which was a huge issue because understanding the lay of the land is critical to a viewer's enjoyment.
Plus, Hartnett is a far more charming actor than Lakshya. Bridgerton's Charithra Chandran, on the other hand, plays a stewardess who may or may not have a secret up her sleeve. The others, including the two pilots, are reduced to comic relief. Fight or Flight finds an audaciously lazy excuse to keep the flight airborne despite an incident that, in real life, would've forced governments to scramble jets and shoot it out of the sky. The only reason why the pilots don't ground the plane immediately is because they sense that the hijacking could get them a movie deal. 'I like Hanks,' one of them tells the other, making a reference to Clint Eastwood 's Sully.
But the movie isn't quite as straight-faced as the John Wick films, nor is it as tongue-in-cheek as the stuff inspired by them. Barring the action scenes, which are admittedly done rather well, Fight or Flight struggles to smoothen out some of its budget -related restrictions. The lighting is flat, supporting performances are stilted, the whole thing has a distinct 'Direct-to-DVD' vibe. Fittingly, it's the kind of movie that you'd discover aboard a flight, only to swiftly fire up your favourite Friends episode instead.