Josh Hartnett's Comeback Continues with the Gleeful B Movie Bloodbath Fight or Flight

It's what Snakes on a Plane should have been: fun!

The increasingly delightful Josh Hartnett follows up his performance as a serial killer in Trap with another iconic turn as a man uniquely skilled at murder who kills without remorse or regret in an enclosed space.

In Trap, the enclosed space is a stadium ecstatic at the prospect of experiencing the music of M. Night Shyamalan’s modestly talented daughter at an afternoon show.

Hartnett kills considerably more people in Fight or Flight, yet emerges as the hero because the assassins that he slaughters en masse here are what Donald Trump would call bad hombres and nasty women.

In Fight or Flight the former teen idol with the cold, black eyes of a shark plays Lucas Reyes. He’s a former Secret Service agent and all-around badass whose career imploded when he chose morality over duty.

Lucas is enjoying a dissolute life in Bangkok as a lost soul in a bleary haze of drunkenness and depression when he gets an unexpected call from Katherine Brunt (Katee Sackhoff), an ex-girlfriend and former professional colleague.

The high-powered government operative convinces her ex-boyfriend to hop on a plane from Bangkok to Los Angeles to find a mysterious computer hacker known only as Ghost.

Like many movie hackers, she’s gorgeous enough to be a supermodel but also has the agility and fighting skills of a distaff James Bond. Lucas doesn’t know Ghost’s identity when he boards the plane. Throughout the film, he’s perpetually pickled and intensely inebriated, but that doesn’t slow him down.

On the contrary, being fucked up just seems to make Lucas’ instincts sharper. He’s a Western version of Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master. The more he imbibes, the better he fights.

The high-functioning alcoholic quickly ascertains that Ghost isn’t one of the many bruisers on the flight but Isha Mandhal (Charithra Chandran), a small Indian woman passing herself off as a stewardess.

Early in what turns out to be a very eventful flight, Lucas fights to the death with Chayenne (Marko Zaror), a flamboyant killer who tells Lucas that the cabins are full of assassins eager to eliminate Ghost in exchange for a healthy bounty.

If Fight or Flight were the winking, hyper-macho late 1990s Tarantino knockoff that it sometimes suggests, it would take great pleasure in introducing every larger-than-life criminal, possibly with a freeze-frame with their name and relevant information.

I appreciated that Fight or Flight did not do that. It’s confident in its badassery; it does not need to try too hard. It’s immediately satisfying in no small part because it’s modest in scope and ambition. It just wants to give us a good time. It succeeds.

Ghost/Isha is forced to trust the spectacularly untrustworthy Lucas because he’s committed to keeping her alive at least long enough to hand her over to his ex-girlfriend.

Lucas only appears to be a nihilist motivated exclusively by greed and self-interest. Like many a scruffy cinematic rogue, he’s a secret idealist. That’s what got him fired and blackballed. It’s also what leads him to join forces with Isha.

There’s a MacGuffin onboard as well, a revolutionary supercomputer that Ghost/Isha created that promises to make someone or some people absurdly rich and powerful.

Isha/Ghost and Lucas’ true identities become known. The hacker and the former secret service agent aren’t the only good guys onboard. They’re assisted by Master Lian (JuJu Chan), an old school martial arts master, in uniform, along with two of her more adept proteges.

Fight or Flight begins wild and ridiculous. It gets increasingly ridiculous until our anti-hero is out of his mind on psychedelic toad venom that makes him even better at murdering large groups of people.

Fight or Flight goes too far and keeps going. It’s a film of deliberate excess, a bloodbath that’s the cinematic equivalent of what in television is known as a bottle episode, since almost all of the action takes place in one setting.

The plane transporting the heroes, villains, and anti-heroes from Bangkok to Los Angeles isn’t particularly large—it’s not a 747-style monolith. It’s cramped and cozy, which adds to the sense of claustrophobia.

Hartnett’s performance strikes just the right tone. It’s goofy, campy, and tongue-in-cheek, but with a melancholy edge and an underlying sense of morality. Chandran is terrific as his sidekick and partner. She is a tiny woman with a huge presence and solid chemistry with Hartnett.

Fight or Flight is everything that Snakes On a Plane should have been, but most assuredly, it was not: campy fun that’s disposable and delightful in equal measure.

3.75 out of 5