The second film that my wife and I saw on Saturday during our movie marathon was this action thriller that intrigued me ever since I saw its trailer. It seemed promising with well known cast and interesting plot. Well without further ado, here's more on the movie.
Brief Story Line
Madolyn Harris (Michelle Dockery - The Gentlemen, Downtown Abbey series etc) was a US Marshall tasked to apprehend and bring Winston (Topher Grace - Spider-man 3, That 70s Show TV series etc), the accountant for crime boss as the witness to testify against him. Due to its remote location in Alaska, Madolyn had to charter a small plane to another town where they were supposed to go to New York. The plane's pilot Daryl (Mark Wahlberg - The Union, All the Money in the World etc) came soon after as they embarked on a 1.5 hour flight to the location.
However, things were not as it seemed though and the flight became really dangerous for all on board.
So what would happen to the flight and how would the story conclude? You could find out in this movie.
End of Brief Story Line
Just as I thought, this movie was pretty intense and suspenseful. It started with the introduction of the first two main characters, the talkative Winston and the very strict Madolyn which I thought was sufficient enough to provide context. Later we were introduced to the third character, the overly friendly pilot Daryl. And it did not take long for us to reach to the interesting part which I thought was good for a film with short duration like this. It was only 91 minutes without any mid or post end credit scene.
During the flight scene where almost the entire film was shown, my wife and I felt it to have plenty of suspense. However, there were few times where the pace slowed down a bit though it was not up to the level of boring. The conversations among the three sounded realistic with Mark Wahlberg successfully made us really annoyed with him. And I thought his dedication in here should be applauded as I read that he shaved his head daily during the shooting, instead of wearing bald cap. Topher Grace did pretty well in portraying the cowardish accountant. My only surprise was the choosing of Michelle Dockery as US marshall considering she is an English actress.
Aside from those three, there were additional support cast providing the voices of Madolyn's supervisor Van Sant (Leah Remini - The King of Queens TV series etc), her director Coleridge (Paul Ben-Victor - Plane etc) and Hassan (Maaz Ali - American Horror Story season 12 etc). Funny though that a different actor of Monib Abhat portrayed Hassan. The part that my wife and I enjoyed in the movie was the intensity, some action in confined space which was more entertaining with the support of good sound effect. The best thing for us was definitely the fate of one of the character in the end as it was truly satisfying.
This film was directed by Mel Gibson who had done great jobs in directing multiple award winning movies like Hacksaw Ridge, The Passion of the Christ, Braveheart and few others. Unfortunately though his work here was not appreciated at all by critics. To my surprise, even audience did not like it too much either, however the box office performance was not as poor as I thought. The movie itself was written by Jared Rosenberg which according to what I read was voted as one of the "Black List" for year 2020, an annual list of Hollywood's most liked screenplay that have not been produced. I guess Mel Gibson saw this to be worthwhile as he was credited as one of the producers.
Overall this is a pretty entertaining action thriller in confined space with plenty of intense moments. Despite low critical rating and poor audience reception, my wife and I enjoyed the film as we could feel the intensity till the end, without waiting for too long to reach the fun part and overly complicated story. So if you are interested in film with such attribute, then you could certainly give it a try. Just do not expect this to be an Oscar-worthy kind of films that Mel Gibson directed in the past.
Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
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