Fight or Flight

Dizzying and kooky, this 'Die Hard on a plane' knockoff nonetheless features whizbang action, puckish charm via Josh Hartnett and a let's-just-have-fun comedic spirit.

“Fight or Flight” isn’t winning any points for originality. It’s basically another ‘Die Hard on a plane’ knockoff, featuring Josh Hartnett as a disgraced Secret Service agent maneuvered by spy bosses onto a jet from Bangkok to San Fran. Ostensibly it’s to capture a mysterious operative known as the Ghost, but then he finds out half passengers are themselves killers chasing the price on the heads of both his quarry and himself.

I guess I should amend my curt description to ‘John Wick on a plane,’ since that franchise is purloined as brazenly as Bruce’s. But you get the idea.

It’s a dumb premise for a movie, and it knows it, and leans into the let’s-just-have-fun comedic spirit rather than acting ashamed.

Honestly, this is the most fun I’ve had in a movie theater this year.

(Well, belay that — nowadays I watch most of my movies in advance via a press screener on my laptop, sitting in bed rounding midnight. But you get the idea.)

Hartnett plays Lucas Reyes, who got shuffled out of the Secret Service two years ago and even placed on the no-fly list for doing very bad things. (Or rather, bad things to bad people who deserved it but have friends in powerful places, who then did bad things to him.) He’s basically just been wallowing and drinking since.

He gets tapped into going after Ghost by his former paramour, Katherine Brunt (Katee Sackhoff), now an uppity-up in the American spy world — the sort of thing where they monitor and control the action from a room with a lot of little screens and one big screen. Ghost has been doing all sorts of eco-terrorism type stuff, spilling secrets and making the rich and powerful uncomfortable.

They don’t know what Ghost looks like, but know he’s on the plane. So it’s up to Lucas to find him, capture and keep him alive so the authorities can debrief (read: rendition) him into spilling his information. But the word has gone out with a $10 million bounty on Ghost, and on Lucas for good measure, so the whole thing turns into one long fight scene moving from compartment to compartment of the jetliner with all sorts of national security concerns at stake.

Did I say John Wick? Really, it’s ‘Air Force One on a plane.’ (OK, yeah, that was already on a plane.)

The pilots and crew are pretty useless, except for one flight attendant, Isha (Charithra Chandran), who seems to have a level head and helps Lucas out catch as catch can.

Lucas is not portrayed as the usual grim badass type — think Gerard Butler, and did I mention this movie actually resembles the “Has Fallen” franchise if it took place on a plane? He’s kind of a f*ck-up and a brooder, can certainly hold his own in a fight, but suffers all sorts of humiliations while doing so.

Early on his clothes are ruined in a bathroom beat-down, and he has to spend the rest of the movie martial art-ing in flowy blue jammies.

Occasionally the action will flip back to Katherine working things from her end, having to fend off the idiocy of a brash middle-manager type named Hunter (Julian Kostov). But soon things are back on the flight, where Jason Bourne-esque things go on, if there were to take place on a plane.

Director James Madigan, making his feature film debut after a long run in visual effects and as an assistant director, shows a real knack for staging the action from all sorts of kooky angles and perspectives, giving it just the right mix of thrills and laughs. It’s pretty gory stuff, too, such as one combatant who carries out most of their encounter with the stem of a wine glass protruding from their eye socket.

Gougings, shootings, stabbings, chop-socky-ing, a multicultural array of bad guys coming in waves, and Josh Hartnett at the center of it all, cackling with mad glee, figuring he’s probably going to die anyway so why not go out bang-bang style?

“Fight or Flight” is simply a blast, an imitation that may just reach a higher altitude than the movies (so many of them) it’s ripping off. That may just be flattery, but I sincerely mean it.