REVIEW: Flight Risk - crisp, tense and effective

Sometimes the simplest pleasures are good enough in the cinema – a good old-fashioned thriller based on a decent plot and some nifty acting.

There will be plenty more sophisticated films than Flight Risk, but they’ll be struggling to top the sheer risky ride of it, tense, dramatic and well delivered.

Topher Grace is Winston, a fugitive captured in the Alaskan wilderness where he quickly agrees to make a deal with the US marshals, to save his own skin and to drop in it the crime boss vastly higher up the chain. So it becomes Air Marshal Madolyn (Michelle Dockery)’s job to escort him back to civilisation on a tiny little plane being flown by the rather over-familiar Daryl (Mark Wahlberg). Quickly into the film, it’s just the three of them up in the air – and that’s how it stays pretty much for the rest of the movie.

But the balance of power shifts and keeps on shifting throughout. Winston in the back tumbles to the fact that Daryl, all leers and malevolence, isn’t remotely who he claims to be – at which point Daryl overpowers Madolyn. And then they overpower him – and so it goes on.

But there is an enemy without as well. Once Madolyn manages to remember she’s got a satellite phone, she quickly tumbles to the fact that there’s been a leak (and not just the one that Winston took in his seat). When she’s talking to her fellow agents, how can she know whether they are helping her or betraying her further? And the rot, it seems, goes right to the top. Meanwhile, nasty Daryl in the back is snarling his way through his restraints – and you know it won’t be long before he’s… well, not exactly making a dash for freedom. Bringing the plane down would be more his thing.

It's a modern variation on the closed-room thriller – and it works surprisingly well, not remotely outstaying its welcome for a crisply-enjoyable 91 minutes. There will be plenty more worthy films along before long, but for the moment, Flight Risk, directed by Mel Gibson, will do nicely.