Featuring everything from a drug-fuelled bathroom fight to a chainsaw bloodbath, the stunts in new action movie Fight or Flight are exceptionally brutal. For star Josh Hartnett, though, this was a major selling point for joining the high octane plane thriller.
“I was able to do my own stunts for it, which I haven’t been able to do since I was in my 20s,” the actor who plays lead mercenary Lucas Reyes tells GamesRadar+. “And it’s a lot different when you’re in your 40s, but I thought that would be an interesting challenge.”
The new movie, directed by James Madigan, follows Hartnett’s Reyes as he’s pulled back into the line of duty after years on the run. His mission is simple: find a mysterious criminal hiding among the passengers of a long-haul flight. However, it’s only when he gets on board that he realizes he’s not alone in his search as a plane full of assassins have a similar assignment.
Hartnett says getting ready for the wild action sequences was a tricky task involving getting in shape as well as training for about six weeks with the stunt teams. But, it paid off as it afforded him the chance to film some of the sequences in one shot.
“There was a bit where I come in like two thirds of the way through with a drinks cart,” he recalls referencing one of the shots from the trailer. “Then we sort of go through a series of different people fighting, and they shot all of that in one long tracking shot and then we turned around, we did another tracking shot for the other side of the plane. I think in the edit, they end up coming in and popping different shots, but we tried to keep the sequences as intact as possible.”
He continues: “We would work them out as though it was a theatrical stage performance. We wanted to make sure that we could actually do it. It wasn’t just one punch at a time or one kick at a time, it was much more than that and so that sort of choreography, that dance was fun to create.”
It’s especially impressive, the Oppenheimer actor adds because they were operating on a pretty modest budget. Thankfully as well as being created by the company behind John Wick, Hartnett explains they had even more help behind the scenes.
“We had a great DOP who had done The Raid, and a bunch of other films that were done in a gritty fashion with a lot of good action and so like we had somebody there who was going to be able to visualize it in a great way, too.”
The results really pay off in the new movie, which also stars Bridgerton’s Charithra Chandran and The Mandalorian’s Katee Sackhoff. Fight or Flight releases on Sky Cinema on February 28. For more, check out our guides to 2025 movie release dates and upcoming movies.
