My Thoughts on “Fight or Flight ✈️”

 

(This is the theatrical poster for Fight or Flight ✈️. It’s also the Blu-Ray cover 💿) 

 

 

Which will you choose? Fight or flight? I must say, that is a pretty clever title for an action movie set on a plane ✈️. Now that I’ve gotten my review of Nobody (2021) out of the way, I can finally talk about this movie, Fight or Flight ✈️, an actual new movie that came out this year in 2025. I can finally add it to my list of new movies that I saw in 2025. I still won’t do a New Year’s Eve Recap this year though because I haven’t seen enough new movies this year to justify me writing a whole recap of all the movies that I saw in the year; as in, new releases. After this movie, I plan reviewing Shadow Force (2025), the recent spy flick starring Kerry Washington and Omar Sy, and directed by Joe Carnahan, the director of such movies as Blood, Guts, Bullets, and Octane 🩸, Narc, Smokin’ Aces, The A-Team (2010), The Grey 🐺, and Boss Level. It came out on May 9, 2025, and it was a box office bomb 💣, making only $5 million 💵 against a $40 million budget 💵. That’s pretty bad 😬, but when has that ever stopped me? I’ve reviewed plenty of box office bombs 💣 and disappointments on this blog, and I plan on reviewing more of them. I’ve also reviewed plenty of movies that received negative reviews from critics, mostly negative reviews from critics, and this movie [Shadow Force] got some; it was ravaged by critics when it came out. I bought that movie on Blu-Ray 💿 at a pretty affordable price, I’ll talk about it more in the review when I get to it. But, let’s get into this movie, Fight or Flight ✈️, shall we? 

So, Fight or Flight ✈️ is about what we assume to be a drunk, reclusive, and burnt out mercenary 🥴 named Lucas Reyes (Josh Hartnett) currently living in Thailand 🇹🇭 (in Bangkok to be more specific), who gets sent on a mission that he doesn’t want to do by a woman ♀︎ that he doesn’t want to work for anymore named Katherine Brunt (Katee Sackhoff), who we assume is a government agent, to find this mysterious international criminal or terrorist simply referred to as “the Ghost.” They don’t know the Ghost’s identity, they don’t know what their name is, what their age and date of birth is, what their gender is, what they look like, nothing. All they know is that they’ve been recently shot, and they have a gun shot wound, and that they’ve boarded a flight ✈️ bound for San Francisco 🌁. So, they put Lucas on this flight ✈️, so that he can find the Ghost, apprehend them, and bring them into whatever agency Katherine works for. 

 

In exchange for bringing in the Ghost, Katherine agrees to clear Lucas’s name of whatever he’s wanted for (because he’s a wanted fugitive on the run), and give him his life back. However, the mission is not to be as simple as they all assume because once Lucas gets onto the plane ✈️, and once it takes off and is in the air, it turns out there are bunch of assassins and hitmen on that plane ✈️, and they’re all after the Ghost as well. But, unlike Lucas, who’s mission it is to bring the Ghost in alive, these assassins and hitmen on the plane ✈️ are there to kill them because the Ghost had a bounty on their head, and they all want it. So, Lucas must find out the identity of the Ghost and protect them before any of these assassins and hitmen can find them first and kill them before the plane ✈️ reaches its destination. 

 

 

 

 (These are screenshots I took from the trailer. They’re from the opening scene, where Lucas is hanging out this local bar in Bangkok, getting a drink 🥃, and these armed enforcers show up, that work for Katherine, to force him into taking the mission, and refuses, saying that he can’t run anymore and he’s done; and then one of them punches him, and they get into a bar fight, that largely happens off screen.) 

 

 

 

That’s about all I’ll say about the plot without spoiling too much. There are so twists, turns, and surprises in the movie that will be so much better to experience on a first time viewing without you knowing that they are coming. Nothing is what it seems in this movie, and that is one of its strengths, and one thing that will make it fun to watch, not just on a first viewing, but on repeat viewings, when you notice all the hints and clues 🔎. So, if you’re someone who cares that much about spoilers and going into a movie as blind as possible, or at least knowing as little about a movie’s plot as possible (just knowing the very basics), then you mustn’t read any further. Go watch the movie for yourself first, and then come back here and read to rest of the review because as usually with my reviews, I’m pretty much going to spoil everything about this movie, and tell you everything that I think about what happens in the movie; at least, the things that stick out to me the most and I have the most to say about. 

 

Just know that I liked the movie, and I do recommend it to anyone who likes action movies, especially R rated action movies because let me tell ya, this is a hard R action movie; it is as hard R as you can get. It is bloody 🩸 as hell. Granted, it’s not as bloody or gory 🩸 as something like The Night Comes for Us, but how many films are? It’s certainly bloodier and gorier🩸 than the John Wick films, the Equalizer films (except for The Equalizer 3, which amped up the blood and the gore 🩸 compared the first two films), the Nobody films, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, The Beekeeper 🐝, Plane ✈️, the Bad Boy films (except for maybe Bad Boys II and Bad Boys: Ride or Die), Weekend in Taipei, and The Killer’s Game. The only recent action movies that it come close to in terms of how bloody and gory 🩸 it is are Boy Kills World and Bullet Train 🚅🇯🇵, which are both relevant to this review, and I will address in a moment. I’ll start with Bullet Train 🚅🇯🇵. 

Now, when the trailer to this movie dropped back in February of this year, a lot of people compared it to Bullet Train 🚅🇯🇵, like they were essentially saying that it was “Bullet Train 🚅🇯🇵 on a plane ✈️,” and yeah, after watching it, I can confirm that is indeed “Bullet Train 🚅🇯🇵 on a plane ✈️ .” It was exactly how I thought it would be, which might be weird and contradictory considering that I just said the movie had a lot of twists, turns, and surprises that I genuinely didn’t see coming, and that nothing is what it seems in this movie; and while is indeed true, the overall movie itself is mostly what I expected. It’s just like how I explained it in my Nobody (2021) review, it’s about a reluctant assassin (or mercenary), who doesn’t want to be an assassin (or a mercenary) anymore and wants to live a normal non-violent life, getting sent on a mission he doesn’t want to do, a form of transportation that’s a confined space, and is full of assassins who are after the thing he’s after, and he has to kill them all in order to complete his mission. 

 

The only difference between this movie and Bullet Train 🚅🇯🇵, is #1 it had a much smaller budget, obviously; the exact budget has never been disclosed due to it originally being a streaming movie that got a theatrical release (it was released on Sky Cinema in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 28, 2025, and then was released theatrically in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 9, 2025), but you can tell that it was made on a much smaller budget than Bullet Train 🚅🇯🇵, which had a budget of $85.9 million-$90 million 💵. #2 the main character (the reluctant assassin/mercenary) doesn’t ally with any of the other assassins to combat a greater threat, and instead only allies with the flight attendants on board the plane ✈️. #3 the mission the main character is sent on is slightly different; in Bullet Train 🚅🇯🇵, the main character, Ladybug 🐞 is sent to retrieve a briefcase that’s either full of money 💵 or has some important item in it, while in this movie, Fight or Flight ✈️, the main character, Lucas Reyes is after a person who’s a high value target that’s wanted by the US government 🇺🇸 for various crimes and terrorist attacks around the world, and he has to protect that person and bring them to the US 🇺🇸 alive; Lemon 🍋 and Tangerine 🍊 are the only ones assigned to protect someone (the son of the White Death, simply called “the Son”) in Bullet Train 🚅🇯🇵, not Ladybug 🐞. 

 

#4 we get a more scenes focused on the main character’s handler (in this case, Katherine) and there’s an entire subplot on ground, focusing on her; we don’t even know that Sandra Bullock is Ladybug 🐞’s handler, Maria Beetle 🪲 (yes, that’s her character’s actual name) until the very end of the movie, and her role is ultimately just a cameo; just an excuse to have Sandra Bullock appear at the end for a minute or so, and surprising the audience, who didn’t expect it to be her. There is a lot more setup and backstory in this movie compared to Bullet Train 🚅🇯🇵, like we learn a lot more about what the initial mission is, and who the main character is, and what his personal stake in all this is, and what exactly his relationship to his handler/contact is; the only characters Bullet Train 🚅🇯🇵 gives us any backstory on are the other assassins and criminals on the train 🚅, and the main villain, but not really, Ladybug 🐞 himself or Maria Beetle 🪲. 

I also noticed a lot of The Last Boy Scout in here as well because as it turns out, Lucas is a former Secret Service agent. That’s the agency he used to be apart of, he was in the US Secret Service 🇺🇸, the agency that protects the president and other officials and even diplomats from other countries when they visit the US 🇺🇸. When the movie got to explaining Lucas’s backstory, and the explanation for what he is, or what he was prior to the events of the movie, I couldn’t believe how similar it was to The Last Boy Scout, and the backstory of Bruce Willis’s character in that film, Joe Hallenbeck. It is 1V1 The Last Boy Scout. He’s a former Secret Service agent who lost his job because they beat up the politician (or diplomat) that he was assigned to protect because he saw that politician (or diplomat) beating up a woman ♀︎; specifically, a prostitute, because the politician/diplomat in question is a bit of creepy perv, who’s into sex and drugs and is super debaucherous, just the worst human being imaginable; the last person you’d ever want to be assigned to protect. And when he sees this abuse going on, he just can’t take it, he can’t just stand by and let it happen, and decides to put a stop to it; he doesn’t care if he’s assigned to protect, he will not let this injustice go, he can’t let this heinous deed go unpunished, he has to right this wrong. I’m surprised they didn’t have him go full Cameron Poe from Con Air, and have him say, “Don’t treat women ♀︎ like that!” while he’s beating the guy ♂︎ up. Which works because Con Air, also takes place on a plane ✈️; granted not a commercial airliner ✈️ like in this movie, but on a prison transport plane.

 

And then after losing his job as a Secret Service agent, he comes a drunk burnt out 🥴, who’s kind of lost his purpose, and is kind of just going through the motions; he’s just existing rather than living. But, over the course of the movie, after going through this harrowing experience where he has to use some of his old skills and kill lots of bad guys, he redeems himself and finds a sense of purpose and self again; he regains the will to live. Only difference is that Joe Hallenbeck actually landed himself another job after being fired from the Secret Service, a pretty good one considering the circumstances, as a private investigator (PI), and still has his family, he’s still living with them, he’s still in his daughter’s life and is still present in the household, and he’s still married, even his wife cheats on him with his partner, while Lucas Reyes has nothing. He has no family, no wife, no kids, nothing, he’s single; cursed to be a bachelor because of what he chose to do; he essentially got punished for doing the right thing, the morally right thing to do, and trying to protect a vulnerable person being abused before his very eyes. 

The situation for Lucas is a lot more dire because his brother was in the CIA, within the top leadership, and after he learned what he did and learned that he lost his job at the Secret Service, he used his position at the CIA, and the full resources of the agency, to go after him, making him a wanted fugitive on the run from the US government 🇺🇸. His brother sent many assassins and hitmen (some belonging to criminal organizations) to kill him, but Lucas is such a badass that he killed all of them and is still at large by the time the movie starts, and he’s in Thailand 🇹🇭. He’s pretty much been reduced to a homeless drifter, going from place to place, and Thailand 🇹🇭 (specifically Bangkok) just happens to his current hiding spot. Thailand 🇹🇭 is a good hiding place for anyone who’s on the run, just ask Rob Cohen—the director of The Fast and the Furious (2001), XXX (2002), Stealth, and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor 🐉🇹🇼—he fled there after he was credibly accused of sexual abuse by multiple women ♀︎ 😬. It’s like the people who made this movie decided to take Bullet Train 🚅🇯🇵 and The Last Boy Scout (or at least the aspect of the main character being a disgraced former Secret Service agent), and combine them into one movie, and have it all take place on a plane ✈️. BTW, it was a bit of false advertising for the trailer and the posters to claim that this movie was “from the producers of John Wick,” because of the two producers of the film that have Wikipedia pages, only one of them actually worked on the John Wick franchise. Nobody (2021), Nobody 2, and of course, Bullet Train 🚅🇯🇵 had more the creative people behind John Wick involved than this movie did. 

 

We also learn about Lucas’s relationship with Katherine, like how exactly do they know each other? Well, it turns out that they were boyfriend and girlfriend, and when he beat up the diplomat he was assigned to protect, she basically turned on him and abandoned him just so she could keep her job. I don’t remember her exact reasoning, her exact justification for turning on him and leaving him behind in Thailand 🇹🇭, but whatever her reasoning was, this ended their relationship, and Lucas has never forgiven her ever since. That’s why he was so mad 😡 when she called him at the beginning of the movie, and why he refused to talk to her at first, and kept hanging up on her. They had one helluva bad breakup, and he partially blames her for why he lost his job and why his life turned upside down, and isn’t able to return to the US 🇺🇸, partly due to him being designated as a flight risk; which Katherine reverses so that he can get on that plane ✈️ to find the Ghost; who turns out to be one of the flight attendants. The Ghost didn’t disguise themselves as a passenger, but as a flight attendant, and not only that, but she is also a woman ♀︎. A woman ♀︎ named Isha Mandhal (Charithra Chandran). 

It turns out, she’s actually not a terrorist or a criminal, or at least, not a willing one, she is a former child slave (heavily implied to be of Indian descent 🇮🇳 despite her very British sounding accent 🇬🇧), who was forced to become a hacker working for various criminal organizations and terrorist groups that have ties to some of the biggest corporations on Earth 🌎. But, she turned on her captors and employees, and decided to use her skills to save the world, and prevent any other kids from being enslaved and exploited for profit 🤑, and it was these activities that not only made her a target of the US government 🇺🇸, but also a target of the same criminal and terrorist organizations she once worked for; that’s why she has a bounty on her head, and why all these assassins and hitmen are after her on this plane ✈️. But, the real prize is actually this computer device, a supercomputer that she may or may not have built herself, that is capable of hacking into any encrypted code, and she plans on using it to take down the corporations that exploit children all over the world. 

This is where we get our other major twist, our other major revelation, that Aaron Hunter (Julian Kostov), one of the agents under Katherine’s command (the guy ♂︎ who looks like Brian Tyler Cohen or Aaron Parnes, and whose actor always plays a Russian 🇷🇺 in almost every other thing he’s in), was the real villain all along; he’s not only the one who put the hit on Lucas while he was on the plane ✈️, but also later revealed Isha’s identity to all the assassins and hitmen on the plane ✈️. He wants the supercomputer for himself, so that he can enrich himself 🤑, become a billionaire, and make the social media company that he and Katherine work for, BlueHype even more profitable. That’s the other big surprise and twist is that it turned out that Katherine and those other “agents” that were working for her, weren’t actually working for a government agency this whole time. 

 

They were actually working for a tech company called BlueHype; the Wikipedia page says it’s an app company, but it seems like it’s more of a social media company, similar to Twitter 🐦 (now known as X, though no one actually calls it that) or Bluesky 🦋, the Twitter 🐦 alternative that emerged after Donald Trump won the presidency (again) in 2024 and Elon Musk joined the US government 🇺🇸 and formed a new agency called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which he essentially used to run the government as a shadow president; Trump kind of took a back seat in the first few months of his second term, and let Elon Musk take center stage, and run everything, while still pretending he was just working at this new agency he created called DOGE. 

 

Elon Musk currently owns Twitter 🐦 AKA X, and because he had joined Trump’s administration, and dismantled all sort of government agencies, and took over the treasury while he was working in government, and because he had turned Twitter 🐦/X into a right-wing cesspool of misinformation and disinformation, as well as bigotry of all sorts, people turned to this new platform called Bluesky 🦋, which was created in 2019, as a research initiative led by founder and former CEO of Twitter 🐦, Jack Dorsey, and then became fully independent in 2021. Bluesky 🦋 grew in popularity after Elon Musk bought Twitter 🐦, and reshaped it in his horrible image and began using to as a political tool to help the Republicans, specifically Trump. 

 

It especially grew in popularity after Elon Musk truly entered politics and became a government official leading a new (and unpopular) agency…for a few months before being driven out of government by the huge backlash against what he and his agency were doing, and also by growing divisions and tensions between him and Trump. So, Bluesky 🦋 was for anyone who didn’t like Elon, who didn’t like Trump, and who didn’t like what Twitter 🐦 had become under Elon, and it became a social media juggernaut in its own, holding its own against Twitter 🐦/X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. I don’t have a Bluesky 🦋 account by the way because ever since leaving Twitter 🐦 back in 2021 (before Elon took over), I’ve tried to avoid social media altogether, and just stick to YouTube. But, the company in this movie is called BlueHype. If that isn’t a direct reference to Bluesky 🦋 (or even just Twitter 🐦 or social media in general), it’d be a massive coincidence. 

 

So, none of what they’re doing is government sanctioned, but is due to the whims of a greedy corporation 🤑 looking to increase its profits, and make itself even more powerful. Despite what he’s doing being highly corrupt, highly illegal, and highly unethical, Katherine decides to go along with Aaron’s plan, and help him acquire the supercomputer that Isha brought onto the plane ✈️, seeing the financial benefits of having it in their possession 🤑. But, Katherine ends up killing Aaron at the end, so it begs the question, was she really on board with his plan, or was she against it and always planning to kill him after he revealed his plan to her? At first, I thought maybe she was a good guy still, and she killed him to do the right thing, but when she calls Lucas for that final time, and she asks him to bring in both Isha and the supercomputer and he refuses, and she gets mad at him 😡 and he tells her to fuck off, it becomes clear that she’s also evil too and she doesn’t have any good intentions. So, why did she kill Aaron (Hunter that is, not Parnes)? My guess is that she got greedy 🤑, and just wanted the supercomputer for herself and want to cut him out of the loop. She also didn’t like that he betrayed and went against her orders, even if he’s the one who told her about the supercomputer. 

There isn’t much to go off in terms of the production, so I can’t give you an in-depth explanation about the behind the scenes of this movie. The only thing the production section on Wikipedia says is that the movie was directed by a guy named James Madigan (this is his directorial debut), and it was written by Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona, who is mostly an actor, who appeared in such movies as: G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Dear John, Shazam! (2019), Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and Spy Kids: Armageddon; he was also in a 2005 movie called Venom, which nothing to do with the Marvel comic book character of the same name, and is instead an original supernatural slasher film. He’s also been in a few TV shows like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Skin, Windfall, Detroit 1-8-7, From Dusk till Dawn: The Series, Matador, and L.A.’s Finest, which is a TV show that’s apart of the Bad Boys franchise, centering around the character, Sydney “Sid” Burnett, Marcus Burnett’s sister who was first introduced in Bad Boys II. I wonder how people even realized that show was even tied to the Bad Boys franchise, because Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett don’t appear in that show at all (Will Smith and Martin Lawrence were both too expensive I guess), and unless you actually remember Sid from the second movie and remembered she’s Marcus’s sister, you’d have no idea that was even in the same universe as Bad Boys. 

 

This is his first writing credit, from what I can see, so this movie’s a first time for everyone. It also says that this movie’s script had appeared on the 2020 Black List of best unproduced screenplays. If you don’t know what that is, it’s basically this annual survey of “most liked” unproduced scripts. It started in 2005, by Franklin Leonard, a development executive who worked at Universal Pictures and Will Smith’s own Overbrook Entertainment production company. While some of the script featured in the survey and end up on the list get made into feature films (theatrical or otherwise), the majority of them do not. But, Fight or Flight ✈️ was added to that list, in 2020, and did eventually get made as we can all see. The reason why it didn’t get made until now of course is because of the COVID-19 pandemic 🦠😷, which put a halt to a lot of movie productions at the time, and prevented a lot of scripts from getting made. A lot of the other scripts were in the 2020 Black List did eventually get made too, but years later after the pandemic 🦠😷 ended, and everything (mostly) went back to the way it was. 

 

But, Fight or Flight ✈️ could’ve easily have been a pandemic era film 🦠😷 because it is kind of a bottle film, where it’s set mostly in one location, in a confined space, where you can easily fake that and have them be a set or on a soundstage, which is probably what it was anyway, and you have two parallel storylines where the main character (Lucas) and effectively the main antagonists (Aaron and Katherine) don’t actually interact with each other on screen, since he’s on a plane ✈️ several thousand feet in the air, while they’re on the ground in a completely different country, just giving him orders from a safe computer room (and also putting a hit on him). Bullet Train 🚅🇯🇵 was a pandemic era movie 🦠😷, if you look at the behind-the-scenes footage of that movie, you’ll see that everyone is wearing masks 😷 in between takes, and the director and the film crew are also wearing masks 😷. So, I’m not sure why they had to wait till after the pandemic 🦠😷, when it’s the kind of movie that could’ve easily have been made during the pandemic 🦠😷. Maybe, it was actually filmed during the pandemic 🦠😷, and they just waited to release it now, sort of like War of the Worlds (2025), or like The Toxic Avenger ☣️ (2025), or like Americana 🇺🇸, that movie with Sydney Sweeney and Halsey.

 

I wish I could confirm that, but the Blu-Ray 💿 that I got the movie on doesn’t come with any special features. It just has the movie, and that’s it. It is as barebones as you can. It’s like the Blu-Ray release to The Beekeeper 🐝 or Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant. The last thing that the production section on the Wikipedia says is that Josh Hartnett apparently did all his own stunts, which is cool. I don’t exactly know how true that is, or if it even is true, but that’s cool if it is true, even just by a little bit. Josh Hartnett did well on whatever choreography and stunt work he did do, that scene where he’s crawling on a floor covered in broken glass is kind of stressful and uncomfortable to watch because of how close his eye is to the glass shards (even if they obviously weren’t real glass); it made me think he was going to stick his eye with one of those glass shards, even obviously, he has both of his eyes in later scenes that we haven’t seen yet that the trailer showed. 

 

The action is great, it’s the movie’s main strength, and why it’s even worth watching in the first place. There isn’t a ton of it, like it’s pretty spread out in between the talkie scenes, but when we do get it, it’s spectacular and worth the price of admission, or worth the price of the Blu-Ray 💿 that I bought, which is how I saw it; I bought it at Walmart for a pretty decent price, I forgot to mention that in the foreword of my East 🇳🇱🇮🇩 (2020) review. This movie would have failed on some level if the action wasn’t good and wasn’t badass, cool, and exciting, it is an action movie after all. It’s like a horror movie failing to be scary 😱, or a comedy movie failing to be funny 🤣, and in this movie’s case, it’s an action comedy, a combination of both genres. I personally didn’t really find the movie funny, like none of the jokes really made me laugh. The scenarios in the movie, assumed me, but they weren’t enough to make me laugh at loud 🤣. 

 

But, the movie made up for its lack of genuine laughs 🤣 by being a badass action movie with cool as hell fights; some bloody fights 🩸 too, like that chainsaw scene is nuts; I guess I should’ve guessed that the movie, or at least that scene in particular, was going to be bloody 🩸, I mean, it involves a chainsaw after all, there’s no way that’s not going to be bloody 🩸, unless you try to cut around and not show the impact and the chainsaw cutting through people, but this movie shows everything. It shows people getting their arms sawed off, people getting sawed in half, people getting stabbed in the gut by the chainsaw, and blood 🩸 just gushing everywhere, getting on everything; all while Lucas is high off of some toad venom he took (thinking it was adrenaline), and is grinning like a madman while cuts these assassins down as if he were Leatherface, or Frank West. 

 

 

 

(This is another screenshot from the trailer. It’s showing a glimpse of the final fight, specifically, the part where Lucas gets the chainsaw from Isha, and he says, “Oh yeah,” and starts cutting into fools.)

 

 

 

That’s probably the main attraction of this movie, the main selling point, the fact that Josh Hartnett is in it. Josh Hartnett is an actor, who’s been around for a while, and whose career really took off in the 1990s. For the longest time, he was mostly known for movies like Halloween H20: 20 Years Later 🎃, The Faculty, The Virgin Suicides, Pearl Harbor (2001), O (just a movie called O), Black Hawk Down, 40 Days and 40 Nights, Sin City, and Lucky Number Slevin, which I had intended to review before reviewing this movie but couldn’t actually buy it in time to get to it. Not just because it had Josh Hartnett in it, and it was timely, but because one of the comments on the trailer joked about it, calling the movie, Passenger Fifty Slevin 🤣, which of course references both Lucky Number Slevin and Passenger 57, a 1992 action movie starring Wesley Snipes as a former Secret Service agent coincidentally (although he went into become a security consultant for commercial airlines ✈️, training flight attendants in self defense), set mostly on a plane ✈️. You can see the obvious connection; always bet on black 🤣; if you’ve seen Passenger 57, or at least seen a review of it or a clip of that specific scene, you’ll recognize that line, it’s word for word what Wesley Snipe’s character in that movie, John Cutter says to the main bad guy on the phone, he asks him if he’s ever played roulette, and the main villain says, “Occasionally, why?” and John Cutter answers, “Always bet on black”; because you know? He’s black. Passenger 57 of course was famously referenced at the beginning of Bad Boys, when Marcus Burnett said, “Wesley Snipes, Passenger 57, motherfucker,” or something to that effect; I know for sure he namedrops Wesley Snipes and Passenger 57 when he’s trying to come off as badass to these criminal that him and Mike Lowrey are trying to apprehend. 

 

 

 

 

(This is the comment that I was talking about that made the joke about Passenger Fifty Slevin.) 

 

 

 

 

 

Josh Hartnett was in some other movies too like Hollywood Homicide, which was 2003 buddy cop movie he starred in opposite Harrison Ford, which hardly anyone liked and didn’t do that well at the box office (which is probably why hardly anyone’s heard of it or remembers it), at least the time it came out, and was in Wicker Park (almost kind of looks like Wylde Pak from a distance, kind of sounds like it too when you say it), The Black Dahlia, August (2008), I Come with the Rain 🌧️, and 30 Days of Night; which I could’ve named in the section of movies he’s most known for, but even then, this might not be the first or even second thing that pops to mind when they think of Josh Hartnett and the movies he’s been in. But, after I Come with the Rain 🌧️, he kind of stepped back from acting for a little bit, took a break from it, not involved in activism for a little bit. That’s not to say he wasn’t acting at all in the 2010s, he was, but it was usually in smaller direct-to-DVD 📀 or direct-to-Blu-Ray movies 💿, or foreign films that hardly anyone’s ever heard of, let alone seen. 

 

Like, he was in a Turkish war movie 🇹🇷 called The Ottoman Lieutenant 🇹🇷, and how many people have even heard of that movie? But, it had been a long time since he had been in a mainstream Hollywood movie. People thought his career was over, and he was just a failed star, that was the perception of him for the majority of the 2010s. But, it wasn’t until the 2020s, when he really started to make a comeback and started appearing in more mainstream movies that people have actually heard of and seen. A comeback that we largely have to thank Guy Ritchie for since he casted him in a couple of his movies in the early 2020s like Wrath of Man ♂︎ and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, which was the first thing that I had actually seen Josh Hartnett in for a long time; I mainly associated him with Pearl Harbor (2001), a childhood favorite of mine, and hadn’t really seen any of his other movies. Both movies, coincidentally, he co-starred alongside Jason Statham, which was his first collaboration with Guy Ritchie since Revolver in 2005; Jason Statham and Guy Ritchie hadn’t worked together in 16 years. 

I did rewatch Operation Fortune, like a couple of weeks ago, when our Internet 🛜 was still off, and it’s still pretty good, it still holds up two years. What can I say? Guy Ritchie can make a good spy flick 🤷‍♂️. See, Luc Besson? You can make a good spy movie set in the modern day. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, during one of the behind-the-scenes featurettes for Anna (2019), Luc Besson (the writer, director, and co-producer) said that the reason why he set the movie at the tail end of the Cold War, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is that spy movies set in the modern day aren’t cool because of the tech they’ve got, like computers 🖥️💻, smartphones 📱, drones, AI, etc., and he prefers his spy movies to be analog and involve people; like how spies used to be during the Cold War. The way he said it, he made it seem like spy movies that are set more in present times aren’t cool because the heavy use of digital technology, and only spy movie set in the past, where everything’s still mostly analog, are cool; the spy movies of old. But, Operation Fortune definitely proves him wrong, spy movies set in present times can be cool, and can be just as cool, if not cooler than spy movies set in the past. 

 

Like, I like Operation Fortune, and I actually like it more than Anna (2019). I mean Anna (2019) has some things to like about it, it’s not an irredeemably terrible movie or anything, but going off of pure entertainment value, Operation Fortune has it beat. It does a way better job at modernizing the spy genre, which Anna (2019) did sort of attempt to do despite being set in the past, while also being somewhat of a throwback, which Anna (2019) also tried to be; though Anna (2019) tried less to be a throwback to James Bond, or any other spy movie or spy TV series from the past (like Get Smart, Mission: Impossible, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Avengers, and Wild Wild West 🤠), and tried more to be a throwback to La Femme Nikita, and other femme fatale movies that Luc Besson is kind of known for (not just La Femme Nikita, but also The Fifth Element, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc to a certain extent, Lucy, and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets). 

 

As far as Cold War era spy movies go (as in, modern spy movies set during the Cold War), The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015) is also way better than Anna (2019), like does everything that Anna (2019) sets out to be, in terms of being a spy movie set during the Cold War, where everything was still mostly analog and still had to be done by people, and couldn’t all be done on a keyboard ⌨️, or by drone, or with an AI. Guy Ritchie just has Luc Besson beat when it comes to making good spy flicks, him and Matthew Vaughn. Matthew Vaughn and Luc Besson are both amateurs compared to him when it comes to spy flicks. I guess it helps that Guy Ritchie’s style is just as well suited to making spy movies as it is to making slick, comedic crime movies. BTW, I posted my review of Anna (2019), a few months ago), if you’d like to read it. I mean, it’s not technically a review, but still. 

 

Orson Fortune does seem like he’d be a pain in the ass to work with because how needy he is, and how he keeps asking for expensive items, like wine 🍷 and private jets 🛩️, and keeps asking to go on lavish vacations to places like Morocco 🇲🇦; I don’t remember which city in Morocco 🇲🇦 he was vacationing in at the start of the movie, if I rewatch the movie again, and they say what it is, I’ll update this part and add it in. It almost like he’s determined to bleed the UK 🇬🇧’s coffers dry. Is that why he’s called Fortune? Because every time he works with MI6, they end up spending a fortune just to accommodate his expensive tastes. Possibly millions or so of British tax payers’ money 🇬🇧💷 since in the film, Fortune asks for a private jet 🛩️, which his boss, Nathan Jasmine is more than willing to give him because he’s the best of the best, and MI6 needs him right now. It is important to note, however, that Orson is not an actual MI6 agent, he doesn’t work for the British government 🇬🇧. He’s a private contractor. 

 

That’s one way that the movie modernizes the spy genre, brings it up to date for the 2020s, intelligence agencies like the CIA or MI6 are relying less on actual agents of their respective agencies, people who are full members of those agencies and receive a government salary, and relying more on private contractors, private military companies (PMCs); mercenaries basically. We saw this transformation begin at the beginning of the 21st century with the onset of the War on terror, where the US government 🇺🇸, began relying more and more on the private sector for matters involving military operations and intelligence gathering. So, you started seeing more of these mercenary spies, for lack of a better term, and Orson, and his and Nathan’s rival, Mike Hook are a couple of them. And it wasn’t just the US 🇺🇸, that relied more on the private sector for military and intelligence matters, the British government 🇬🇧 followed suit, since it was a close ally of the US 🇺🇸 and was heavily involved in the War on terror, and even the Russian government 🇷🇺 got in on it, with the Wagner Group; even though mercenaries and PMCs in general are technically illegal under Russian law 🇷🇺, the Kremlin still uses them and still relies on them to carry out their foreign policy goals, particularly in Africa, where Russia 🇷🇺 has been trying to gain more influence and has gained ground. 

 

Of course, the Wagner Group would end up getting placed more under federal control after Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed coup or uprising against Vladimir Putin in the summer of 2023; the same year Operation Fortune came out oddly enough. So, Orson is not completely loyal to the UK government 🇬🇧 and is not completely dependent on them for a paycheck since he’s not a full member of MI6 and can go elsewhere for money 💵 if the British 🇬🇧 don’t pay up. Or at least, that’s the sense that I get from how the movie presents him; Nathan tries to appeal to his patriotism, his love for his country, Britain 🇬🇧, when trying to convince him to take the mission, but it hardly persuades him. He’s like James Bond, if James Bond was a mercenary and would work for anyone, not just the British 🇬🇧, so long as they paid him well. But, whenever he does work for the British government 🇬🇧, he makes sure to get the most bang for his buck. That’s he kind of overcharges for his services, and why he always asks for the most expensive stuff, when he’s on a mission or when he’s on vacation. 

 

At least, he didn’t use any British tax payers’ money 💷 to pay for that production company he starts to produce Danny Francesco (Josh Harnett’s character)’s next movie, instead he used the proceeds from the robbery of that villa owned by the Ukrainian mobsters 🇺🇦 (the ones that stole the Handle that the arms dealer, Greg Simmonds is trying to sell on the black market to the highest bidder, and Orson and his team are trying to retrieve before Greg Simmonds can sell it) to pay for it. So, it’s funded by dirty money 💵 basically. A Hollywood production company funded by stolen money 💵, where have I heard that one before 🤔? I’m talking about Red Granite Pictures, the production company behind The Wolf of Wall Street 🐺 and Dumb and Dumber To, if you couldn’t already tell. They shut down in 2018, after it was discovered by the US Department of Justice 🇺🇸 (back when it wasn’t corrupt and actually did solve crimes, instead of being a tool for Trump to go after his political enemies, or hide his involvement in the Epstein scandal) that they were involved in an international money laundering scheme 💵 involving a sovereign wealth fund in Malaysia 🇲🇾 called 1MDB (1Malaysia Development Berhad 🇲🇾); it was called the 1MDB scandal 🇲🇾, something that DOJ named as “the largest kleptocracy case to date”; the main architect of which, Jho Low is still on the run from Interpol, and hasn’t been caught yet unfortunately. 

 

Also, I just noticed that Josh Hartnett has played two characters named Danny. The first time was in Pearl Harbor (2001), where he played the totally fictional character, First Lieutenant Danny Walker, and the second time was in this movie, where played the character, Danny Francesco. And with this movie, Fight or Flight ✈️, this is the second time that Josh Hartnett has been in a movie that involved a super advanced AI or supercomputer, after Operation Fortune. Funny how that works. After this, of course, Josh Hartnett was in a couple of other movies like Trap, which wasn’t that good from what I hear but Josh Hartnett was good in it (a lot of people said that he was the best thing about the movie), and Oppenheimer, which I didn’t even know he was in until now, when I was writing this review. Did you know that Josh Peck is also in Oppenheimer? It’s crazy that these actors from our childhoods, who were once child actors and teen idols (in case of Hartnett) ended up in a Christopher Nolan movie together, and one of the biggest movies of 2023 at that; it was the second half of Barbenheimer after all. And both of their names are Josh! Isn’t that crazy? It all lead to this, to him starring in this movie, Fight or Flight ✈️, a movie that was produced by one of the producers of John Wick ☝️, and is essentially Bullet Train 🚅🇯🇵, but on a plane ✈️ instead of a train 🚅🚄. 

 

He is good in the movie, not on the action side of things, but on the performance side of things. He plays the character very vulnerable, very unglamorous, and frustrated, like you can tell that he doesn’t really want to do this, but he’s doing it anyway in hopes that his ex-girlfriend from the unspecified “Agency” (I assume the CIA) will actually hold her end of the bargain and clear his name and give his life back after he brings in the Ghost, who is of course revealed pretty early on to be Isha. And he takes a lot of damage in this movie, like he gets pretty fucked up in this movie (more than you typically see action heroes get), and is always either on the verge of passing out or dying. He’s in a literal hospital bed by the end of this movie, that’s how fucked up he gets in this movie. And of all the so-called “regular guy ♂︎” action heroes we’ve gotten for the past decade or so, Josh Hartnett as Lucas Reyes looks the most like a regular guy ♂︎. 

 

I mean, he’s 47 years old, he’s old enough to be someone’s dad, and while his character in this movie doesn’t have kids, you could buy that he is just a regular guy ♂︎ who is vulnerable, who can get hurt and does get hurt real bad, and can die at any moment if he’s not careful. He’s not superhuman or invulnerable by any means; he’s no John Wick by any means. My favorite line of his in this movie, is at the beginning when he’s hanging out at that bar in Bangkok: “If I die in your bar, you can sell my organs to pay my tab,” which he says to the bartender after the bartender tells him he’s going to die young due to all the heavy drinking 🥃 he’s doing, and the bartender replies, “I don’t think they’re worth what they used to be.” That’s my favorite moment in the whole movie, and it was my favorite moment in the trailer when I first saw it back in February. I always watch that part on repeat whenever I rewatch the trailer on YouTube. 

Katee Sackhoff is in this movie, which I didn’t even realize a couple of weeks before I actually watched the movie. I didn’t even recognize her when I saw the trailer for the first time, and the only reason why I snapped and finally realized that it was her is that I kept seeing episodes of her podcast 🎙️, the Sackhoff Show in my recommended feed, and I kept seeing her face in the thumbnail; and when I rewatched the trailer, I realized that it was her, it was older Katee Sackhoff and I got more excited to watch this movie because I like Katee Sackhoff. I think she could’ve been a bigger star than she ended up being, because she’s just that badass; she’s good at playing badass action women ♀︎. If you read my Metroid Prime Remastered review from a couple of months ago, you’ll know that I said that had they made a live action Metroid movie in the 1990s or the 2000s, Katee Sackhoff would’ve been a good pick to play Samus Aran, and I do still stand by that. It was cool to see her in this movie, and she is good in it. She didn’t get to do any action aside from shooting Aaron in the head at the end of the movie, because they gave her a more talkie role. 

 

For most of the movie, she’s just in this computer room, giving orders to Lucas, monitoring his progress, and reacting to what’s going on the plane ✈️, as well as ordering her underlings along, Aaron and those two analyst guys ♂︎, whose names I don’t actually remember; they’re one of the actors who don’t have Wikipedia pages, and there a lot of them in this cast. She’s pretty much the Maria Beetle 🪲 equivalent for most of this movie, except we actually see more of her face and she has a whole subplot dedicated to her. It’s not until they do that reveal that they’re working for a social media company and not for the government, and Aaron has been pulling the strings that we see Katherine do more stuff. And of course, she turns out to be just as evil as Aaron is, as she wants the supercomputer too, and still wants Lucas to hand Isha over; even though we learn that Isha isn’t actually a villain deserving of being handed over to BlueHype, and was just trying to do the right thing and protect kids, and Lucas ultimately disobeys her and doesn’t hand Isha or the supercomputer over to her. 

 

It’s a shame that we didn’t get to see Katee Sackhoff kick ass in this movie, and her character turned out to be a villain, I would’ve even accepted her being a villain had she actually got to fight Lucas at the end, and he killed her at the end, or if anything happened to her; if she got some kind of comeuppance besides just losing out on the asset, Isha and the supercomputer. Maybe, she wasn’t interested in doing any action, and was content with just being the talkie villain, the talkie twist villain I should say; the movie technically has two twist villains, her and Aaron. It would’ve been a little bit more satisfying had Lucas and Isha actually crash the plane ✈️ into BlueHype headquarters, where Katherine and Aaron are working at, or if we saw them land the plane ✈️ at all. But who am I kidding? They clearly didn’t have enough money 💵 in the budget to do something like that. Nor did they have any money 💵 to do a final climactic fight scene with Lucas and Katherine, where Lucas kills her; and Katee Sackhoff herself was more than likely was disnterested in doing any fights in this movie, which is why she was content with taking a very talkie non-physical role. 

 

We don’t even see them land the plane ✈️ at all. It just cuts to Lucas laying in a hospital bed in the middle of a war zone, he gets up, and Isha tells him their job isn’t finished and she still needs to him, and he yells, “Fuck!” and the movie cuts to credits. It makes it seem like they’re setting up a sequel, but I don’t honestly think that they’re going to make a sequel. I have a strong feeling that this is just a one and done thing, and we aren’t to get a follow up to this. This is just a comedic ending, just so the movie could end on a joke like, even after going rogue and saving Isha, Lucas still doesn’t get to rest, he still doesn’t to have a normal life free from any violence. She’s pretty much just using him in her own crusade to take down the corporations of the world, and save the children. How that relates to the war zone that they’re in, I don’t know, and we’ll probably never find out because this movie probably won’t get a sequel. I could be wrong on that, and if I am, I’ll let you know in an update or in a future. But, right now, I doubt this will get a sequel despite how it ends.

Probably my biggest disappointment with this movie are the assassins on the plane ✈️. The assassins in the movie are not real characters, they’re just cannon fodder, they’re just there to give Lucas and Isha’s bodyguards someone to fight. That was another weird aspect of this movie that kind of came out of nowhere, Isha has these three bodyguards, these three women ♀︎ who come from this Southeast Asian tribe, who belong to this Southeast Asian ethnic group (I forgot exactly what they say they are and where they came from), who Isha met while on her journey, trying to free children from enslavement, and trying to punish the corporations and criminal organizations that are involved in these global human trafficking operations, kidnapping children and using them for forced labor. And they basically became her protectors, and they follow her wherever she goes, and they came onto this plane ✈️ with her, and  they immediately attack Lucas, assuming that he’s one of the assassin out to her get her, and she has to explain to them and he’s an ally and he’s there to help. 

 

They looked like they came from a completely different movie, they looked so out of place, but they were still pretty cool, they kicked a lot of ass. All three of them are played by actual martial artists, so you know that they nailed the choreography, and had some pretty smooth moves; smoother moves than Josh Hartnett in all honesty, but that’s not what they going for with him, his character’s not really meant to be a skilled martial artist, capable of doing jumps, flips, kicks, and the splits like he were Jean-Claude Van Damme in his prime, but more of a brawler; he can fight, but not that way. It’s a shame that they all die, like all three of them die during the final fight, and the only ones really left alive are Lucas, Isha, the two male flight attendants who are actually flight attendants, and the actual passengers who are not assassins hiding in plain sight and kind of become an afterthought in the film. These three women ♀︎, Isha’s bodyguards, they’re the kind of colorful characters that I wish more of the assassins were in this movie. 

 

Like there’s no Lemon 🍋 and Tangerine 🍊 equivalent in this movie, no characters who are obsessed with Jay Jay the Jet Plane 🛩️ like Lemon 🍋 was obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine 🚂. At least, The Killer’s Game actually attempted to make the assassins feel like actual characters with distinct personalities, and making them as over-the-top as they could. Like, you had Terry Crews in that movie, who started out as an antagonist after Dave Bautista’s character in that movie, Joe Flood, but kind of becomes an ally, or at least, he chooses not to kill him in the end, and turns on the actual bad guy of that movie, Pom Klementieff’s character, Marianna Antoinette. Then, of course you had Scott Adkins playing a minor role as a Scottish assassin 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 named Angus Mackenzie with a brother named Rory Mackenzie played by Drew Galloway. There’s very little like that in this film. 

 

They do attempt to have a couple of the assassins be colorful characters, like Chayenne, who kind of reminds me of the dancing assassin from The Killer’s Game, the Spanish guy 🇪🇸♂︎, Emilio “El Botas.” At first, they try to misdirect you a little bit, making you think, is he gay ⚣? Is he trying to flirt with Lucas? Because their interactions are so awkward, and come across as flirty on his end, and then it’s revealed that he’s an assassin, and he tries to kill him because he thinks he’s the Ghost, and I was like, “Oh okay, I see what they were trying to do here. They were trying to make him seem innocent, make him seem nice, like he’s just a normal first class passenger who took a liking to Lucas, and is like an idol or something, when really he’s a trained killer.” But, he gets taken out pretty quickly, like he’s the first assassin that Lucas fights and he kills him fairly easily. He ain’t shit.

 

Then there’s this other assassin named Cat Eyes because of the weird contact lenses she wears that makes her eyes look like cat eyes. They keep showing her every once in a while, making you think she’s going to be a major character, she’s going to be a major antagonist throughout the film, but she doesn’t do anything. She just sits around and looks at everyone. And when she does get up and tries to do something, Lucas immediately kills her by stabbing her in the head with a pick axe ⛏️  while he’s high off that toad venom he accidentally took (thinking that it was just adrenaline). This movie could’ve benefited from having more of the assassins be actual characters, or at least give the assassins that they did have as actual characters a lot more to do, and have them last longer in the film. Instead of just making all the assassins generic faceless henchmen that are just there to give Lucas and Isha’s bodyguards someone to fight and kill. 

 

 

(This is the streaming poster for Fight or Flight ✈️. It is also the thumbnail for the trailer on the official Sky TV YouTube channel.) 

 

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(This is the trailer for Fight or Flight ✈️.)