Stow your tray tables and brace for comedy in ‘Fight or Flight’

“Fight or Flight” — 3 stars

Some actors are best left to weather outside until they’ve properly aged, like firewood or a good Scotch. (Humphrey Bogart being the ideal example.) Josh Hartnett was something of an It Boy at the turn of the millennium, with lead roles in “The Virgin Suicides,” “Pearl Harbor,” “Black Hawk Down” and more. Then, like with many It Boys, his career cooled.

Two decades on, Hartnett’s in his mid-40s and popping up again, as a serial-killer dad in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Trap” (2024) and, this week, in the ratty, fizzy action comedy “Fight or Flight.” An actor who once seemed a passable carbon copy of the young Tommy Lee Jones has apparently decided he has little left to lose, and it’s made him … interesting. He’s grumpier, wearier, wilier. He’s having FUN.

“Fight or Flight” gives Hartnett ample room to play. An unrepentant B-movie with a Grade A concept — the star plays a former Secret Service agent who has to find and arrest an unknown terrorist on a plane full of assassins — the film takes what could have been grim going in the hands of, say, Steven Seagal and gives it an antic, often hilarious spin. Yes, it’s violent in arcs and spurts of increasing absurdity, but the frenetic pace, slaphappy fight choreography and committed performances keep “Fight or Flight” teetering on the edge of farce. If the John Wick movies were played for laughs, they might look something like this.

Hartnett’s Lucas Reyes is bottle-blond, burned-out and washed-up in Thailand when the movie opens, but he’s the only one on the ground when his higher-ups in America need someone to catch the Ghost, a brilliant international hacker-terrorist who’s boarding a red-eye to San Francisco. The Ghost’s identity is unknown, so he could be anybody on the plane, but Lucas’ job, once he sobers up from his latest bender, is to find the terrorist and bring him in alive. Unfortunately, the Ghost has a $10 million bounty on his head and a travel itinerary that just went public on the dark web, which means that some, or most or all of the agent’s fellow passengers aren’t tourists on their way to the City by the Bay.

Helmed by James Madigan, a second-unit director moving up to the big chair, from a screenplay by Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona, “Fight or Flight” is high-spirited junk, too full of itself at times but mostly content to work out every last variation on a theme: How do you kill someone on an airplane? The assassins come in baroque waves and are dispatched in the same manner, from a pompous actor-hitman (Marko Zaror) to a lady “apex predator” (Nóra Trokán) to Chinese gangsters and Italian mobsters and a lot of hulking guys played by actors named Tíbor and Gábor and István. (The movie was filmed in Hungary.)

Not everyone on the plane is out for blood. The flight crew includes an officious prat (Hughie O’Donnell), an OCD newbie (Danny Ashok) and Isha (Charithra Chandran of TV’s “Bridgerton” and “Alex Rider”), who becomes Lucas’ ally, social conscience and impromptu medic. The Ghost has a few ringers on the flight, as well, including a trio of lady samurai because — well, just because.

Believable? Not in the least. Enjoyable? Surprisingly so, once you hop on the wavelength of giddy, exhausted overkill along with Hartnett’s increasingly woozy hero. “Fight or Flight” juggles not only chain saws but also ice axes, small in-flight butter knives, a clarinet wielded with lethal force, and a vial of toad venom that briefly causes Lucas and the movie as a whole to hallucinate pretty fireworks where other characters see geysers of blood.

On its way to an ending that’s both preposterous and the only logical way out, the filmmakers broker the notion that not ALL international hacker-terrorists might be bad people, and that some of the shadowy figures who move between the worlds of national intelligence and Silicon Valley might be measurably worse. But that’s taking “Fight or Flight” more seriously than it deserves. “How much more (expletive) up can this get before it qualifies as (expletive) up?” someone asks here. The answer: a lot.

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In theaters. Rated R for strong bloody violence, language throughout, some drug material. 101 minutes.