Michelle Dockery Battles Mark Wahlberg’s Ruthless Assassin in New Trailer for Mel Gibson-Directed Airborne Thriller "Flight Risk"

Watch Michelle Dockery faces off against a bald and ruthless Mark Wahlberg in Mel Gibson’s new action-thriller set during a flight over the wilderness.

Okay, imagine this intense scenario: you're a U.S. Marshal, tasked with protecting a key government eyewitness. You must escort him on a private flight across the Alaskan wilderness to testify in a high-profile criminal trial. But things take a dangerous turn when you discover that the friendly pilot is actually a cold-blooded contract killer, hired to assassinate your witness. What do you do when you're up in the sky, facing off against a professional assassin? Sounds pretty scary, right?

Well, that’s the premise behind the new thriller Flight Risk, for which a new trailer just dropped. Some of the discussions around the movie, funnily enough, have focused on Mark Wahlberg, who plays the professional hitman posing as a friendly-faced pilot. Apparently, as the movie progresses, Wahlberg reveals himself to be not just a killer—but also a bald one, to everyone’s surprise.

A bald Wahlberg assassin was not on our bingo card for 2025. But here we are. So, why not enjoy this film for what it could be—a cool, intense romp. It looks like an edge-of-your-seat thriller, focusing on just three characters: the heroic U.S. Marshal (played by Downton Abbey's Michelle Dockery), the ruthless hitman (a bald, screaming Mark Wahlberg), and a dubious handcuffed eyewitness (Topher Grace).

Flight Risk is directed by Mel Gibson—yes, you read that right. Gibson, the Oscar-winner for Braveheart, sits in the director's seat for this one, his first directorial effort since helming the acclaimed WWII drama Hacksaw Ridge in 2016. Known for his gritty epics, Gibson pares down his style a bit for this three-person chamber thriller, where most of the action takes place in a small Cessna plane set thousands of feet in the sky. In actuality, the film was mostly shot on a soundstage using the virtual-background “Volume” technology.

Screenwriter Jared Rosenberg wrote Flight Risk, marking his first produced screenplay of his career. In fact, Rosenberg's script was voted onto 2020's “Black List” of the most-liked unproduced screenplays in Hollywood. Other notable screenplays on the same list in 2020 included The Gorge, May December, Emancipation, Magazine Dreams, I.S.S., and Hold Your Breath, among others. It seems Rosenberg is now getting his writing career into full gear, as he has just been tapped by Netflix to adapt John Gilstrap and Kurt Muse's best-selling historical book Six Minutes to Freedom. The book tells the true story of Kurt Must, an American living in Panama who was arrested for his anti-Noriega operations in 1989, leading to the launch of a U.S. Delta Force operation (called Operation Acid Gambit) to rescue him from prison. Sounds like another Netflix miniseries, primed for awards.

Flight Risk is now set to open in theaters on January 24th.