YNOT at the Movies

There's a certain cinematic pleasure in watching a movie dive headfirst into chaos, and the director James Madigan's "Fight or Flight" (USA/UK 2025 | 97 min.), a midair action spectacle does exactly that. Built on a premise that defies both realism and gravity—one half-drunk ex-operative, a mysterious hacker, and a plane full of assassins—it moves with reckless urgency, more interested in carnage than coherence. The result is a film that functions less like a thriller and more like a fever dream in a pressurized cabin.

Lucas Reyes (Josh Hartnett) is an ex-FBI agent who is dragged out of forced exile in Thailand by the very agency that discarded him. His task: escort a high-profile hacker known as "The Ghost" on a long-haul commercial flight back to San Francisco from Bangkok. Predictably, nothing goes to plan. The plane is swarming with contract killers posing as passengers, each determined to eliminate the Ghost, and Reyes if necessary. What unfolds is an airborne bloodbath that gleefully tramples over logic and physics, letting Reyes fight his way through the fuselage like a sleep-deprived wrecking ball.

Reyes is clearly not at his best—he is disheveled, hungover, visibly unraveling. That only adds to the film's chaotic tone. Hartnett leans into the absurdity, playing him as a man who looks barely capable of standing upright, yet somehow manages to outfight, outstab, and outlast wave after wave of professional killers. There's no attempt to ground his abilities or explain away the contradiction. The film simply runs on the conviction that a broken man with a short fuse and a mean right hook can survive anything, provided the carnage never stops long enough to ask why.

The fight sequences come fast and unrelenting, each new confrontation erupting with bone-snapping intensity. But despite the tight quarters of the airplane setting, the film rarely mines the space for suspense or innovation. Instead, it repeats the same blunt-force formula: a burst of violence, a moment to catch breath, and then another assailant lunges into frame. It's effective in short bursts, but the lack of escalation or variation begins to dull the impact.

There are hints of deeper themes—trauma, abandonment, institutional rot—but they're kept vague and disposable, like unfinished thoughts buried under spilled whiskey and bloodstains. The film gestures toward emotional weight without ever really attempting it. Reyes has history, yes, but the movie isn't particularly interested in unpacking it. His past functions more like atmospheric noise than narrative substance.

Still, "Fight or Flight" commits fully to its particular brand of airborne mayhem. It's a film that knows exactly what it's delivering and doesn't flinch from its own absurdity. Josh Hartnett carries it through sheer physical presence and grim charisma, dragging himself from scene to scene like a man too broken to care and too angry to die. There's something watchable, even hypnotic, about its refusal to do anything halfway.

It may not be clever, or stylish, or especially memorable once the dust settles. But while it's playing, "Fight or Flight" offers the purest form of cinematic turbulence—messy, violent, and completely divorced from reality. Fasten your seatbelt. Or don't. Reyes won't notice either way.

"Fight or Flight" opens in theaters on Friday, May 9, 2025.