Fight or Flight Parent Guide

After destroying his Secret Service career with some ill-timed chivalry, Lucas Reyes (Josh Harnett) has been pickling his liver and living off the grid in Bangkok. Then he receives a phone call from the ex who betrayed him (Katherine Brunt, played by Katee Sackhoff), offering him a deal: if he can take into custody a wanted terrorist who will be on an upcoming trans-Pacific flight, he can have his record wiped clean and resume a normal life.

There’s just one catch: no one knows who the terrorist is.

Known as the “Ghost”, this is a “black hat” terrorist who specializes in economic sabotage, targeted at dictators, oligarchs, and corporations with dirty supply chains. And Lucas isn’t the only person after the Ghost. There’s a dark ecosystem full of bounty hunters, all of whom also know that the Ghost will be on the plane from Bangkok to San Francisco. The next sixteen hours are going to make Snakes on a Plane look like a kiddy flick.

We all know that flying has become uglier in the past few years. With narrower seats, shorter legroom, and more ill-mannered, aggressive passengers, flying often feels like airborne purgatory. But no flight you take will come close to the horrors of Fight or Flight. This is an incredibly violent film, with non-stop scenes of physical combat and weapons violence. I gave up on my body count and simply tried to catalogue the ways in which people are killed (or catastrophically injured). To summarize, people are shot, stabbed in the torso, stabbed in the eye (thereby piercing the brain), poisoned, slammed head first into a metal object, punctured or dismembered with a chain saw, stabbed with a grappling hook, strangled with ropes and a seatbelt, thrown out the side of an airplane, and hit on the head with heavy objects (and even an ice pick), and die of a broken neck. There are numerous scenes of dead bodies, often with gruesome injuries, as well as multiple body bags. There’s even a reference to torture, when Katherine casually orders the torture of a witness. The abuse isn’t seen, but the woman’s injuries are visible when she collapses.

Just as disturbing as the quantity of violence is its tone: lighthearted and often comedic. To make it worse, this is pornified violence: it’s exultant, glamorized, and treated as an emotional release. The music is exuberant, the choreography slick, and, in Lucas’s case, the violence is portrayed as redemptive. The script points towards systemic violence, particularly the slave labor used in the supply chains of many consumer electronic devices, but there’s no deep dive here, just a return to the dance of death. The thin plot, abundant violence, cuss-a-minute levels of profanity, and frequent alcohol and drug use justify the Restricted rating. I would actually give Fight or Flight an “A” for “awful” and strongly recommend avoiding wasting either time or money on this film.