Flight Risk’ is a change of pace for Mel Gibson following the overblown histrionics and big budget scale of ‘Braveheart’ and ‘The Passion of the Christ’ in what is Gibson’s first directorial outing in nearly a decade. Set on a small plane that is carrying a prisoner over the Alaskan wilderness, it is effectively a B-movie outing with the same tropes familiar from ‘Con Air’ but with a much smaller budget, and starring British actress Michelle Dockery from ‘Downton Abbey’ as the US air marshal looking after a prisoner, en route to testifying against a gangster, and having to deal with a rogue pilot, played by an over-the-top Mark Wahlberg who has no intention of letting the prisoner, played by Topher Grace, get anywhere near dry land.

It’s a very functional, by-the-numbers affair, effectively drawing on all the tropes we are familiar with from staple air thrillers but pared back. It has every ingredient – the characters who are not who they appear to be, with heroes turning out to be villains, and vice versa – which are hardly going to reinvent the formula. But this is Gibson showing that he still has what it takes to make a pulpy, tense thriller which knows how to push all the right buttons. For much of the movie, Wahlberg, who is clearly the main draw, is incapacitated at the back of the plane where he has been tied up, leaving the non-pilot to fly and, crucially, land the plane.

But like the 80s and 90s thrillers such as ‘Misery’, ‘Cape Fear’ and ‘Fatal Attraction’, the villain finds resourceful means of coming back from the dead only to wreak one final act of mayhem. This binary-driven action film is tense and economical, but having the US marshal and the prisoner she is escorting played by TV actors does make this feel far more low key than it should be. There is even the old chestnut of having Dockery trying to work out via the various telephone calls she makes from the plane with her superiors and colleagues exactly who is the mole and who may not be telling the truth, ensuring that even if she does manage to land the plane there is no guarantee that she and her prisoner will be allowed to live.

‘Flight Risk’ does, however, contain a final scene where the landing does not exactly go to plan and there is a last minute external intervention on the prisoner’s life where the film makes you forget that what you have been watching is a threadbare drama, as the film whooshes, spins and goes off the rails (and the tarmac) with such ferocity and adrenaline that it felt like a variant of ‘Die Hard’.