Lionsgate
Take a look at Mark Wahlberg’s filmography and it’s clear he’s no longer the movie star he was 10-15 years ago when he was making hundreds of millions of dollars from the Ted movies and starring in films directed by Martin Scorsese, Michael Bay, James Gray, Peter Jackson, Adam McKay, and David O. Russell (whose a crappy human but was considered an elite director at the time nonetheless).
Over the last decade or so, other than Uncharted — which was a critical and box office bomb, anyway — Mark Wahlberg has largely starred in dime-a-dozen, borderline B-movie action films such as Spenser Confidential, Infinite, The Family Plan, and The Union (hitting Netflix in a few weeks), and self-serious, under-seen dramas such as Joe Bell, Father Stu, and Arthur the King.
His newest film, the Mel Gibson-directed Flight Risk, looks to be more of what we’ve come to expect from Wahlberg since the turn of the decade — and the fact that Gibson was an Oscar-winning director once upon a time doesn’t earn him any extra points, either. This time, however, there’s a truly enticing catch: Marky Mark is GOING for it.
Not only did Mel Gibson somehow convince him to wear a bald cap — and not even a clean bald, but an oafish male pattern baldness bald — but Wahlberg also decided to uncork both a Southern drawl accent AND a New York City accent. Combine Wahlberg’s surely off-the-wall performance, the B-movie thrills of an action movie set on a plane, and the general existence of Michelle Dockery (of Downtown Abbey and The Gentlemen fame), and Flight Risk becomes one of the summer’s must-watch movies.
In addition to Wahlberg and Dockery, Topher Grace also stars in Flight Risk, which will be released in movie theaters on Friday, October 8.
The trailer for Flight Risk debuted one day after the release of the trailer for Wahlberg’s other new movie The Union, which also stars Academy Award winner Halle Berry.
That film sees Wahlberg as “a construction worker from Jersey who quickly thrust into the world of super spies and secret agents when his high school sweetheart, Roxanne, suddenly comes back into his life and recruits him on a high-stakes U.S. intelligence mission,” according to Netflix.