Flight Risk 2025 is Mel Gibson failing to be Robert Rodriguez

  Blender Dumbass
September 08, 2025

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#flightrisk #melgibson #markwahlberg #film #review #movies #cinemastodon

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The first shot of the 2025 thriller directed by Mel Gibson called Flight Risk is an establishing shot of a location you might see on television, which already says a lot about the movie. But that's not all of it. The shot is also very much computer-generated. I wouldn't say it's Ai ( but anything's possible ). It looks more like a 2D composition using various elements. A modern matte-painting of sorts. It's hard to point out specifically what's wrong with it, but it looks obviously fake. And obviously put together on a computer. And then the rest of the film doesn't really shake off this fakeness.

I have nothing against using good CGI in film. Michael Bay is one director you can point at, who knows how to do it right. But I get it. Mel Gibson didn't have any money to make Flight Risk ( a movie about a tense situation on an airplane ). So he had to cut corners where-ever possible. Using CGI in this case makes a whole lot of sense. It would not be a Michael Bay approach. It would be more of a Robert Rodriguez approach. Yet it seems like Gibson fails at being Rodriguez too.




A scene later, when we see the airplane for the first time, the establishing shot is so cheaply done, it is astonishing. Just look at this frame. You have what could maybe be a real image ( more like an image they found, and then tried to turn it 3D for a camera-move ). There is a police car that doesn't really blend in properly. Just looking at how long the lens supposed to be and looking at the size of that other car in the background, already makes this police car look at the very least too big.

The airplane itself looks a bit better. I bet they had a proper hi-resolution asset of it for the rest of the film. Still it looks uncomfortably small. And you get the comped-in people who were, I suppose filmed on a Green Screen and yanked into this shot.

And I thought cars in Shazam! 2 were bad. Like yeah those are bad. And I can make better CGI cars myself already. But cars in Shazam! 2 are magnificent compared to the bullshit I see in this one shot in Flight Risk.

If it would be Rodriguez, he would at least do something interesting with this limitation. A lot of Rodriguez movies are terrible when it comes to CGI work. But at least he squeezes a lot of cool-factor out of every terrible CGI shot. His Spy Kids 3 film which is almost entirely shot on a blue-screen and which contains some of the worst CGI in Rodriguez's filmography, still oozes with coolness, making the film endlessly re-watchable, despite being terrible. This establishing shot of the airplane in Flight Risk is just simply pathetic in comparison.

But it's okay. 2 rather cheap looking shots will not break a film. Alfred Hitchcock even had terrible fake shots here and there in his career and nobody seems to care that much about it. So how is the actual thriller part of the film?

The majority of the film happens on that plane. We get, what feels like, a real shot of this plane taking off. And a few CGI shots of this plane in the air. Then the majority of the shots on the plane happen within the plane. It is done on a stage that looks like the inside of the plane, with the LED screens showing video of a sky for backgrounds. It's one of those "the volume" movies.

I think this is not a bad strategy. They could instead make it all on a green / blue screen and it would have been a pain in the ass to work on in post. Leaving a lot of shots really fake. There are a few shots that looks like they were ( for some reason ) done this way. But the majority of the shots look like they were done in camera.

That said, the movie still fails to look convincing. As if Mel Gibson was trying to do a fake looking movie. "The Volume" has it's limitations. Yes, those are LED screens capable of some impressive dynamic range, but they cannot be used alone to light your shot. Even with the best screens out-there you are still not getting the stupidly bright values of like the sun, or the scattering it does in the atmosphere.

It should be theoretically similar to using an HDRI background for CGI shots, which leads to amazing results, but inside of a computer there are no physical limitation of the background. If the image was captured properly, you will get the proper light values from 1 HDRI image. On "the volume" you only get the ambient light and the image in the windows. While the hard light should still be done by you using traditional methods.

It seems like Mel Gibson learned it the hard way, because in the beginning of the film the cockpit shots look rather flat and uninteresting. Giving away the fact that they are fake. But towards the end, the film actually starts to look rather phenomenal. The light becomes good roughly when the time in the movie hits the golden hour, forcing Gibson to use an orange light to penetrate the aircraft with hard shadows.

In the end there are a few rather cool looking shots of the landing of said plane. Mixed in with a few rather shitty ones. But as a whole the ending is a million times better ( visually ) than the beginning.

What about the story? Well we have 3 characters: Madolyn ( Michelle Dockery ) is a police woman that is in charge of delivering a witness Winston ( Topher Grace ) from his hideout in Alaska to the court, where he can testify against a mafia boss. Daryl ( Mark Wahlberg ) is a civilian pilot that helps them fly to their destination over Alaska. But we later understand that he is one of the mafia guys, there to kill them both. And that he is kind of a psychopath.

Wahlberg gives the best performance of the 3 by far. The other 2 are rather dry. Winston is constantly trying to make bad jokes that never land. And Madolyn seems to be an emotionless rock, until about mid-way into the movie, when she too starts to act.

The best character in the film is a racial stereotype called Hassan played by 2 different actors. We see him in the end of the film portrayed by Mobin Abhat and hear him through the film by Maaz Ali's voice. Really weird decision there. Basically, when we learn that the pilot is a criminal, the police lady ties him down and needs to learn how to fly the plane. And Hassan is a pilot that is trying to explain her how to do so. Obviously the first thing he does ( without even knowing her or seeing her ) is to ask her out to a date. And then in the end we recognize him by spotting the first middle-eastern person in the crowd.

The film refuses to show anything outside of the plane itself. And while it does create suspense that way, because we don't really see what happens to the people our protagonist calls, seeing it would not be a bad thing for this movie. Being so restricted to this one location, makes the whole experience feel very cheap. And Gibson doesn't seem to do a lot of anything interesting in this location visually.

The shots are way too clean. I think with a bit dirtier camera work, moodier colors and some film-grain, it could look fantastic. But Gibson is going for this pristine image quality, which immediately looks stupid and fake.

Showing the people that Madolyn is talking to, would have added some energy. And the story has enough stuff in it to warrant an exploration into their parts of the plot. That could have made for some good film-making. No... instead we only hear it. And it feels very bad. At least if the dialogue was written by Tarantino, I would get it. But it is nowhere near that good. So just listening to it, doesn't work almost at all. Except for Hassan. He is fucking entertaining.

I don't know what to say. The film feels like B-movie. But is made like a C-movie. Pretending to be an A-movie. And a lot of potential in the story is being thrown away because Gibson didn't want to move his ass and shoot in more than one location.

Happy Hacking!!!

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