By M. Faust
(photos © Sky UK Limited)

A movie that is only going to run for a trim (by contemporary standards) 95 minutes doesn’t want to waste time getting you involved, and Fight or Flight certainly grabs you by the lapels right in its opening minute, with a berserk melee in an airplane cabin among a dozen or so combatants culminating in a tossed chainsaw and a breached hull. (A chainsaw? On an airplane?) 

This is followed by a scene set twelve hours earlier. Shot from a middle distance, a fellow in a suit is seen walking in front of an office building, bopping happily to the ridiculously cheery Lesley Gore song “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows.” (If you don’t know the tune, the title says it all.) Happiness like this can never last, of course, and within seconds a text message causes him to scream the F word and smash his phone to the ground. 

How the story got to point A from point B is the subject of a movie that is being likened to the John Wick movies (with which it shares producers Basil Iwanyk and Erica Lee) but is substantially more inspired by Matthew Vaughn, writer-director of gleefully ludicrous action extravaganzas like Kick-Ass, Argylle and my particular guilty pleasure, the Kingsman series. 

Vaughn’s movies are generally adapted from graphic novels, which is to say that someone else has done the hard work of spinning out complicated plots for the films to condense. Fight or Flight, on the other hand, is an original screenplay that seems to have been inspired by the kind of video games in which the plot is largely an excuse for mayhem. The director is James Madigan, promoted up from second unit work in Transformers, G. I. Joe and other tentpole franchises. That is to say, he was not hired to be an auteur. 

Our hero here is Lucas Reyes, a former Secret Service agent now living a life of dissolution in Thailand. He is played by Josh Hartnett (the guy with the blond hair in the movie stills), whose prime virtue as a performer is an amiable ability to play ridiculous roles with no more seriousness than is absolutely necessary. Reyes is given a chance to have his past sins wiped from the record and his career reinstated: all he has to do is get on a luxury flight from Bangkok to San Francisco on which is known to be travelling a much-wanted international agitator known only as The Ghost. Bring The Ghost in, and all will be forgiven. 

Reyes might not have taken the assignment had he known that a lot of other countries also want The Ghost, dead or alive, and that the passenger manifest is taken up largely by international assassins. Let the games begin. 

Like Vaughn’s movies, Fight or Flight isn’t exactly a comedy but uses humor to offset what would otherwise be a stomach-churning amount of violence. A fair number of plot points escaped me—I watched the movie on a streaming screener that lacked captions, and much of the dialogue was inaudible even at loud volume. (Sound mixes for movies are designed for theaters, not home screens: that’s why so many people who have perfectly good hearing use closed captions.) But I can’t believe that it made much difference. The film’s conclusion primes the pump for a sequel, and I have no doubt there is already one in development.