James Madigan’s Fight Or Flight (2025) is an intense, no-holds-barred actioner that demands you abandon your intelligence the minute you step in. Logic and plausibility are in short supply as punches are delivered with swift insistence. The action can’t be called off even as the humour is doled out in generous proportions. Josh Hartnett carries a lot of the film’s loony humour, an effortlessly enjoyable presence coasting over its more contrived portions. There’s a lot the film doesn’t quite know how to land but he makes it hold up as long as possible. It takes abundant charisma and breezy skill to make an actioner like this sing.
Fight or Flight depends on Hartnett’s easy body language, his ability to invest the ludicrous with the sensational. He’s one of those actors who can make the sloppy satisfying. Granted that the film does boast of some sleek choreography here and there, it falters in the larger design, especially its notion of an antagonist. It tries to subvert and add twists, most not quite credible. Even the midpoint reveal could have been punchier. What renders it furthermore diminutive is the appendage of nobility and goodness that is tacked onto the ‘target’. The lack of someone solid to root against works against the film, despite its conceit a refreshing change in a film like this.
Fight Or Flight (2025) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
Madigan clearly has thought out the action choreography in considerable detail. He’s confident enough to mostly forsake detailed, dense narrative in favour of long stretches of all-out clashes. Some is truly dazzling, gripping and provide a dizzying high, others lose their power due to not being padded well within a narrative of sustained intrigue. The screenplay doesn’t prop up that many characters, largely revolving around Hartnett and another primary individual. The tussle between the two incites unease and realisation, rassling and solidarity. Initial missions get sidetracked into something else, loaded with deeper meaning and implications. There’s a new thrust of moral purpose, far severed from the more politically vested interests at play when the protagonist Lucas Reyes (Hartnett) is assigned a new task.
Lucas is ex-Secret Service. He’s fallen from grace for reasons that are later disclosed. The film opens with a mysterious Ghost, a cyberterrorist rampaging through the world. Agent Katie gets hold of Lucas, who’s in Bangkok, and puts him on the trail of Ghost. He’s reluctant at first. He has been on a no-fly list, laying low in Bangkok for a while. She promises him she’ll get him his life back if he succeeds in bringing her the target to San Francisco. He’s cynical but she keeps goading him, asking him to trust her, take her word for it. She delivers him a passport and a plane ticket to San Francisco. The Ghost is reportedly on the flight.
Meanwhile, at CIA, an associate finds out many are after the Ghost, a bounty on their head. Essentially the plane is filled with killers. Lucas encounters the weight of this discovery only gradually. Minutes within getting his seat on the plane, he is poisoned by a fellow passenger who proclaims his friendliness, showing him a couple of dance steps. Lucas realises the plane is riddled with extreme danger, as he pounds dead his attacker. The plane is swarming with people aiming to catch hold of the Ghost. So, he has to outrun them, nab the Ghost first and deliver it to Katie.
Gradually, Katie’s backstory with Lucas is revealed. The two used to date. However, on a mission, Lucas strayed from the task and killed a person who was beating up prostitutes. It turned out that person was the brother of someone influential in the CIA. Katie got Lucas apprehended, turned him in. Of course, Lucas hasn’t been able to repose his trust in her since. Katie makes no bones of her ambition, her thirst for getting what she seeks. She’s determined to do whatever it takes, even put her child through the stake if that’s what it entails.
Lucas discovers the Ghost is one of the female flight attendants, Isha (Charithra Chandan). She talks of being trafficked as a child, doing what she does to knock down corporations involved in slave labour. Quickly, Lucas gets on her team. Even on the plane, his photo is being circulated. It turns out one of the CIA operatives, a part of Katie’s team, is looking for the device Isha/Ghost has built. A trade off has been done and Lucas could well lose his life. Katie has no qualms or hesitation in joining her colleague Hunter’s covert operation. After all, she could end up making millions on the sly. She’s instantly game.
Fight Or Flight (2025) Movie Ending Explained:
Does Lucas nab the Ghost?
Lucas has always been on the righteous side and hence joins Isha’s call. She has her supporters on the plane too, a bunch of Thai sisters who are fearsome and staggering and put up a mean fight defending Lucas. Lucas’ task originally was to present the Ghost alive to Katie but of course he does a complete overhaul. When Isha reveals the device to him, her reasons behind her formidable hacking, he is persuaded in her convictions, the moral rigour in her beliefs far more appealing than the nefarious agenda of the deeply unreliable Katie.
The film’s climax is a long-drawn-out violent confrontation between two sides-Isha and Lucas, and the band of assassins which seeks to possess Isha lured by the life-changing bounty. Of course, everyone gets killed and Lucas and Isha end up alive. Even the pilots are dead. Lucas informs Katie he has no idea of the device. Isha confides that the plane was never headed for San Francisco. The two share a moment of mutual admiration and trust. The film closes with a passed-out, wounded Lucas waking up in a makeshift hospital. There’s an explosion. The walls are blown off. Hastily, Isha comes to him and urges him to follow her. For the two, danger is still heavily present, the film’s ending wielding the promise of a sequel.
