Fight or Flight (2025) review

Dir. James Madigan

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★

I would rather endure three hours of raucous inflight turbulence than watch even 10 minutes of Fight or Flight again. Here’s a film that’s basically a copy-of-a-copy to the point that its current iteration might as well be an impressionistic collage of ink-spots with all life and originally Xeroxed into indistinguishable nothingness.

Although they might not be my cup of tea in general, I can appreciate how the John Wick franchise gave action movie fans a new face for whom to root. Along with it came a resurgence for a familiar actor, who needed his next big hit, and some dense mythology to give credence to the bloodshed. The worst thing Chad Stahelski’s series did was make various filmmakers believe they could do the same. For every halfway decent, like-minded flick ala Atomic Blonde or Novocaine, there’s a Monkey Man, or, worse, a Fight or Flight that pummels the audience with bad dialog and flimsy characters as if to make you realize just how integral those perceived “slow parts” in some other, better movies were.

Here, Josh Hartnett — whose career renaissance was going in interesting directions before this — stars as Lucas Reyes, a downtrodden, perpetually hungover cab driver with frosted tips and a tight pink T-shirt. His ex-boss (Katee Sackhoff) rings while he’s on a bender in Bangkok, so desperate for a secret agent’s assistance that she’ll take an intoxicated layabout who has been out of practice for sometime. He’s been on the run from his former superior for a while too, and from the way he has her contact in his phone under “ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NO” to the way he curses her out when she rings, we can assume things ended acrimoniously. We’re also reminded of this when the film takes an extra 20 minutes to get going because Reyes is so angry.

Reyes is tasked with boarding an international flight in order to identify a terrorist onboard known only as “The Ghost” and extradite him or her to the United States. What a flight to board too because it just so happens this plane is harboring about a dozen of the world’s deadliest assassins, including a trio of female Japanese martial artists who appear as if they wandered off the set of a completely different movie. One of these assassins even somehow smuggled a chainsaw on board, along with enough guns that would make the cartel consider investing in this airline if it were truly this inconspicuous and easy.

Screenwriters Brooks McLaren and D. J. Cotrona don’t even try to disguise the fact that they’re actively ripping off Bullet Train with this low-level, Z-grade material. The specifics between Reyes and his boss are never formally contextualized. The hodgepodge of passengers who desire both Reyes and The Ghost dead results in too many swirling motivations to keep straight. The script would much rather have characters spitting out one-liners in misguided attempts at humor, and mistake cobbled together, thinly connected fight scenes with pacing.

What should be a mile-high cat-and-mouse game involving two professionals outwitting one another instead boils down to a sluggish and meandering movie filled with painful dialog and incessant start-stops. Too absent from an already discombobulated mess is a consistent tone. At times, Reyes wants to be menacing. At others, he’s a jokester, and Fight or Flight uneasily oscillates with his inconsistent personality. Josh Hartnett looking and feeling miscast doesn’t help matters either; he does a lot of mugging and damage controlling, but absent is that sinister sociopathy we saw displayed so enthusiastically in last year’s Trap.

For all intents and purposes, 2025 has had far more good-to-great movies than mediocre-to-bad ones. The only other film this year that I’ve loathed as much as Fight or Flight is Love Hurts, a similarly lame actioneer with a miscast lead and a lot of loud nonsense obscuring any attempt at resonance. At one point, not long ago, large-budget action movies had a stronger hit-rate than mainstream horror movies. Times have changed, for the better I’d add. Even Drop is better than any pure action movie I’ve seen this year.

Starring: Starring: Josh Hartnett, Charithra Chandran, Katee Sackhoff, Julian Kostov, Marko Zaror, and JuJu Chan Szeto. Directed by: James Madigan.