Here at The A.V. Club, we’ve been relishing a week of batshit crazy trailer releases. The preview for Mel Gibson’s new film Flight Risk is almost tame compared to the ridiculousness of the Red One trailer—at least, it follows many action-thriller conventions we’ve come to expect from the Trailer Industrial Complex. Yet Flight Risk, which stars Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Dockery, and Topher Grace, still has its share of insane moments that rest comfortably within the bounty of bonkers trailers with which we’ve lately been blessed.
Flight Risk is about a U.S. Air Marshal (Dockery) who has to accompany a fugitive named Winston (Grace), who was apparently hiding out in Alaska, to a trial in New York where he’ll testify against a mobster. The biggest twist of the trailer is not that their pilot (Wahlberg) is actually a hitman sent to take Winston out. The biggest twist is when his hat gets knocked off and he’s revealed to be bald! Presumably, this is meant to make him look more sinister and less like the typically heroic Wahlberg as we know him. This is not your mama’s Marky-Mark; this guy is nuts, and he’s willing to let the plane go down with him in it just to spite his fellow travelers. “I’m gonna tear you apart… to tiny little pieces… they’re gonna need an entire forensics team… to identify you,” he growls in menacing voiceover.
Some of the other gems this trailer has to offer includes:
- Requisite slowed-down cover of a well-known song (they got “Psycho Killer,” guys);
- Sound design wherein Topher Grace appears to scream like a little girl when stabbed;
- A whole other plane which, for some reason, Wahlberg immediately knows is going to try to shoot them out of the sky?;
- An improbable amount of fighting, shooting, whacking, bumping into other craft, flying through avalanches, and somehow still staying in the air;
- Lots of interesting accent work from Dockery and Wahlberg, who toggles between his typical Boston intonation and a wild Southern drawl. At the end of the trailer, he hits us with a line reading that is—incredibly—the tagline for the whole movie: “Y’all need a pilot?”
The Gibson-Wahlberg team-up, which some may call the hate crime collaboration of the decade, premieres in theaters October 18, though you may feel you have quite gotten the gist of the thing after watching these clips. It seems unlikely that the movie itself could live up to the silliness of this trailer, but maybe the feature-length has more surprises in store. Hard to beat the Bald Mark reveal, though!