Mel Gibson’s ‘Flight Risk’ Further Complicates the Old Adage That Conservatives Can’t Make Good Art

In her Golden Globes acceptance speech in 2017, not long after Donald Trump was elected for the first time, Meryl Streep said, “Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if we kick ’em all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.”

Of course, that same guy has since been elected for a second time. The country seems mostly resigned to it. The Democrats are increasingly at sea. And the intense stigma that once came with the perception of Trump collaboration now seems to be softening. All of which has made the present feel like a mask-off moment for Hollywood conservatives. Actors and creators (but mainly actors) whose rightward leanings were once discussed only in whisper or euphemism (is Chris Pratt a crypto-conservative?) have suddenly realized that cozying up to Trump might be as shrewd a career move as keeping one’s views out of the newspapers to avoid alienating liberal colleagues once was. Will more of Hollywood’s limousine liberals soon go the way of the supposedly-progressive Big Tech CEOs—that is, far to the right?)

Trump recently named Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone as his “Special Ambassadors to Hollywood.” As with most ceremonial Trump titles, it’s unclear what this actually means in practice or whether it pays any money. Yet the three do seem to roughly represent the spectrum of Hollywood conservatism. First, there’s Voight, long an outspoken culture warrior who works mostly on the openly lib-triggering side of Hollywood these days (see: his role in Reagan) and has been publicly conservative since at least this 2008 op-ed for the Washington Times in which he called Obama a dangerous socialist. Voight loudly endorsed Trump in 2016 and seems to have been the person Trump was confusing with Anthony Hopkins during Trump’s “late great Hannibal Lecter” phase over the summer, when he was claiming endorsement from the fictional cannibal played by Hopkins. (Voight was a loud Trump supporter who kind of looks like Hopkins, who played Lecter in Silence of the Lambs; hence Trump saying “Hannibal Lecter, how great an actor was he? You know why I like him? Because he said on television, ‘I love Donald Trump.’ So I love him.”)

At the other end of the spectrum, there’s Sylvester Stallone. Although Stallone’s brother Frank Stallone has long been one of the loudest Boomer MAGA guys online, Sly himself has until now been avowedly neutral—which may be why he’s stayed so busy as an actor. Certainly one could infer things from Sly’s movies, like Rambo: Last Blood, a hyper-violent revenge fantasy about human trafficking and Mexican cartels. (The best test of a movie or show’s conservative leanings remains how often it includes the words “cartel,” “trafficking,” or “sicario”). But all the way up until 2019, Stallone was chiding people for assuming (presumably wrongly) that he was “hardcore right.” And as of 2023 he was still doing ideologically baffling things like donating to Kyrsten Sinema. More recently, Stallone has referred to Trump as a “second George Washington” and called him “almost a mythical figure.” Sly’s appointment to Trump’s triumvirate of Hollywood seers seems to confirm his authoritarian leanings, but it is some consolation knowing how much of a blow it must’ve been to Frank’s ego.

Which brings us to Mel Gibson, who in some ways has been as politically hard to pin down as Stallone, but has long existed in a sort of public-opinion limbo. Passion of the Christ was bashed by some as anti-Semitic (even by the ADL, who were more recently seen making excuses for Elon Musk’s Hitler salutes), but went on to be one of the most profitable movies of all time. And then there were multiple rounds of leaked audiotapes, in which Gibson could be heard saying “the Jews cause all the wars” (2006) and “if you get raped by a pack of [N-words], it will be your fault” (2010).

Gibson, the son of a difficult-to-categorize traditionalist Catholic who hated Vatican II, would seem in some ways a tough fit with Trumpism. His bespoke interpretations of obscure religious doctrine seem at odds with Trump’s Bible-hugging, transparently fake “my favorite verse is Corinthians 2” religiosity. Yet Gibson also makes an entirely logical Trump guy, insofar as he represents the community of people who said problematic things, were treated very unfairly by the Woke Cancel Mob, and might appreciate having their case reviewed in a different climate. As a “top banker” was quoted as saying about Trump’s election recently in the Financial Times, “I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”

Lately Gibson has appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast criticizing Democratic leaders and sharing anecdotes about Ivermectin curing cancer, and his appointment as Hollywood Ambassador would seem to confirm his place on the Trump Train. But even before that, while we’ve never seen Gibson in the kind of avowed culture-war projects that attract the likes of Kevin Sorbo or Melissa Joan Hart, he hasn’t exactly been a mainstream Hollywood star either. Representative late-career Mel role: His curmudgeonly part in Mark Wahlberg’s Catholicism-glorifying Father Stu, in which (as it happens) he’s constantly spouting off about “pussies” and “retards.”

As a director, Gibson has a tendency to inject off-putting politics into otherwise pretty solid movies. Braveheart seems deeply homophobic, yet undeniably kicks ass. It’s possible to read Apocalypto as a story about how savage and uncivilized the indigenous peoples of the Americas were before European Catholics showed up (the final shot sees the protagonist escaping his pursuers on a beach just as the first Spanish ships arrive on the continent in the background) but it’s hard not to acknowledge it as a thrilling epic. Hacksaw Ridge (2016), a violent, religious-themed war movie about a pacifist, was nominated for Best Picture.

This week, Gibson is back with Flight Risk, a mostly-single-location thriller that sort of riffs on Midnight Run, with a plot about a US Marshal (Michelle Dockery) trying to get a Mafia accountant (Topher Grace) safely to trial when the two realize that their Alaskan bush plane has been hijacked by a mob hitman (Mark Wahlberg). While not as identifiably conservative as Gibson’s other movies (even if it does include brief references to cartels and sicarios, somehow), Flight Risk is yet another hopelessly watchable Gibson film.

It opens strangely, with a very CGI exterior of a cheap motel, inside which we find Topher Grace’s character, Winston, fretting about the unsanitary conditions and battling a cup of instant ramen. Before that can finish cooking in the microwave, a team of Marshals burst in, led by Dockery’s character (Madolyn), tossing Topher to the floor and unleashing a torrent of what we might call “soy banter” (meanwhile, the ramen explodes, natch). The real horseshoe theory is that shitlibs and MAGAchuds alike seem equally prone to this kind of lazy, sarcasm-drenched post-modernism.

Flight Risk remains a little silly throughout, but becomes an entertaining yarn once the action moves to the interior of the bush plane. Mark Wahlberg plays the impostor pilot, at first doing an over-the-top howdy y’all accent, then turning back into a vaguely New Yorky version of normal Wahlberg for maximum menace once he’s exposed. Wahlberg’s character seems to want to sexually assault Winston and Madolyn as much as he wants to kill them, and the script abounds with prison rape jokes and threats. When Madolyn offers him a deal for cooperating at one point, she says, “Otherwise you’ll spend your whole time in prison looking over your shoulder.”

To which he responds, “I’ve already been to prison, and I was looking over my shoulder the whole time, if ya know whatta mean. My boy Winny knows what I’m talkin’ about.”

He’s talking about having sex! Male-on-male prison sex! Which he… likes? At other points, he suggests being suicidal. The character is kind of hard to pin down, but the easy takeaway is that he’s bad. Irredeemably bad. A cartoon villain. He’s also bald, although the character has no narrative reason to be. He introduces himself as “Daryl,” who has hair, only to be de-wigged and ultimately revealed as Not-Daryl. But since the entire story hinges on the other characters not knowing what their pilot looked like in the first place it’s a little unclear who the wig was for.

Anyway, Wahlberg: villain. Madolyn: relatable heroine. Winston: nerd. For all their corniness and reliance on supposedly taboo tropes (the gay-coded villain, say), what Gibson and Stallone seem to share is a savant-like grasp of archetypes and dramatic pacing. They are on-the-nose and naturally grandiose, of course, but grandiosity has rarely been an impediment to good action movies or thrillers. If anything, the ability to boil down conflicts into terse bons mot here and there—Freedom! Adriaaaaan!— is central to the craft.

At one point, Madolyn grabs the cell phone of a henchman who has been sent to kill her after killing him instead. “Is it done?” the voice on the other end of the line asks.

“No. You’re done,” she growls. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Understanding conservatism as a whole requires a recognition that “conservatives can’t make good art” was mostly just something liberals said to make themselves feel good. A more accurate adage might sound something like “conservatives are frequently geniuses at making mid art”—which in turn translates shockingly well to movies like Flight Risk and Rambo. The root of all conservatism, in fact, might be the desire for simple stories (“white hat good, black hat bad,” “victim actually deserved it,” etc). Which is why it’s perhaps no coincidence that conservatism’s most successful purveyors (Ronald Reagan and his imitator, Donald Trump, but also Steve Bannon, et. al) come from the world of B-movies and reality TV.

Does that mean we shouldn’t enjoy Flight Risk or Braveheart because of their association with conservatism? That’s in the eye of the beholder, but I say no (I don’t know that I could ever not love Braveheart). Any ideology that can actually defeat authoritarianism isn’t going to win by being the party of id-denial. That we enjoy stories that make us feel smart and righteous is probably never going to change. Maybe rather than knocking mid art because of its association with that kind of conservatism, we could start asking what it is that’s so compelling about its tropes and its rhythms, and how we can use that for good.