Call it “Chainsaws on a Plane,” and you won’t be far off the mark.
Of course, to be totally accurate, there’s only one power-driven cutting tool put to lethal use in “Fight or Flight,” director James Madigan’s outrageously and often uproariously over-the-top action-comedy that concocts a cut-and-paste lift from “Bullet Train,” then dials it up to 11 during a Transpacific flight on a humongous passenger plane.
But there are scads of other sharp objects employed as armaments — including sprinkler spouts and shards of wineglasses — along with knives, swords, drug-laced darts and even seatbelt buckles, to say nothing of such traditional artillery as Glocks and assault weapons. (No snakes, however.) If you find yourself occasionally wondering how so many aspiring assassins managed to get so much of this stuff past airport security, especially after you’ve been busted for trying to board a domestic flight with a bottle of shampoo in your carry-on luggage, well, you just might be a tad too logical to fully appreciate the full-bore lunacy of “Fight or Flight.”
The film begins with an ultra-violent flashforward that serves as both a due-diligence warning and a coming attractions trailer. We see in a slo-mo sequence with a wink-wink “Blue Danube Waltz” soundtrack dozens of folks in furious altercations with each other, throwing punches and firing weapons, kung-fu fighting and, yes, tossing a chainsaw — until one not-so-innocent bystander is sucked out of a huge hole in the side of the plane.
But if you listen closely, you can almost hear Madigan promising: “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”
Things calm down a bit — temporarily, at least — as a “12 Hours Earlier” title appears on screen, and we are soon introduced to Lucas Reyes (Josh Hartnett, impressively game and grungy), an American ex-pat who looks very much like something the cat dragged in, reconsidered and dragged back outside. He’s slumped over in the backseat in a motorized pedicab on a Bangkok back street, clad in what we can only assume are the same cargo pants and Hawaiian shirt he has worn for, oh, maybe a week or so. Just in case we fail to grasp the depth of his down-and-out status after he guzzles the last contents of a whiskey bottle for breakfast, he trundles over to a nearby bar for lunch.
“If I die in your bar,” Reyes tells the disapproving owner, “you can sell my organs to pay my tab.” The owner shakes her head disapprovingly, then responds: “I don’t think they’re worth what they used to be.”
Turns out Reyes is our old friend, the bunt-out, plummeted-from-grace ex-agent (in this case, a former Secret Service operative) who’s drinking his way through an extended exile after a disastrous mission, and is in no particular hurry to sober up and return home. He is roused from his self-destructive debauchery only when he receives a call from the supervisor at some unnamed agency, Katherine Brunt (Katee Sackhoff, sternly seductive), who just happens to be his former lover.
Brunt offers Reyes a shot at redemption — along with a huge paycheck, a new passport, and removal from the U.S. No Fly List — if he agrees to board a jumbo-sized passenger plane just hours away from take-off to San Francisco. His impossible mission: locate “the Ghost,” a mysterious “black hat terrorist” believed to be one of the of the passengers. Mind you, no one has any idea what the terrorist looks like, and it’s pretty doggone certain they do not wish to be located. But, hey, Brunt’s people know the Ghost has recently been wounded, and is traveling alone, so they shouldn’t be too hard to find. And besides, Reyes doesn’t have to kill the Ghost — just bring them back alive.
Of course, none of this goes according to plan.
The first complication arises when a fellow passenger laces Reyes’ drink with a sedative, then carries him to the luxury-class bathroom to finish him off. Instead, a fight ensues, since Reyes is far from unconscious: Long-term heavy drinking evidently has made him immune to almost anything short of a bullet to the head. (“I guess you can’t pickle a pickle,” he says, marveling at his own durability.) Indeed, after exterminating his would-be killer, he simply forces himself to throw up the sedative by gulping a bottle of liquid hand soap. Then he’s back on his feet, albeit shakily.
Reyes’ borderline preternatural resilience quickly becomes an amusing running gag in a movie that plays like the most splatterific Looney Tunes cartoon ever made. And it’s a good thing our hero is more indestructible than Wile E. Coyote, since he quickly learns that (a) the entire plane is filled with assassins eager to collect a bounty on the Ghost, and (b) those same assassins have been tipped off to what he looks like.
Aided only by a surprisingly small staff of flight attendants that includes the plucky Isha (Charithra Chandran) and the anxious Royce (Danny Ashok), Reyes engages in a steadily escalating series of mortal combat dustups all over the airliner, from the first-class upper level to the cargo hold, while passengers who aren’t hired killers duck and cover, or wind up as collateral damage.
There are times when it seems Madigan and screenwriters Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona are simply making things up as they go along, merely providing rudimentary linkage from one jaw-dropping, ultra-kinetic action set piece to the next. Gradually, however, a method to their madness emerges, especially when we finally learn just what organization the stern-faced Brunt is working for.
The mayhem is so cartoonish that it elicits far more laughs than gasps. But there are a few non-violent punchlines in the mix as well. A nice touch: The pilots, who know what’s going on behind their locked cockpit door, imagine they’ll be hailed as heroes like Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger if they manage to land the plane.
But wait, there’s more: At one point, assassins line up like the slappers in “Airplane!” to take a crack at their target. At another point, Reyes over-medicates with adrenaline, to the point of hallucinating that the Ghost’s backup trio of kimono-clad bodyguards are women warriors on loan from a vintage Shaw Brothers martial arts epic.
Ultimately, it’s extremely doubtful that any of this would work nearly as well as it does without Hartnett at the center of the storm, anchoring the bloody chaos and generating rooting interest with a performance defined by propulsive physicality, industrial-strength enthusiasm and an indefatigable willingness, even eagerness, to repeatedly make himself the butt of the joke.
One would be hard-pressed to recall another recent instance of an actor expressing such sheer joy in what he is doing on screen. Maybe Hartnett is celebrating his current career comeback, or maybe he’s just high on the thrill of being immersed in such wire-to-wire pandemonium. Either way, Harnett’s elation is marvelous to behold — and highly contagious.