Fight Or Flight tells the tale of two seemingly different people. First, you have Lucas Reyes (Josh Hartnett). He’s a disgraced former Secret Service agent. As you watch the film, you learn why he was disgraced. He’s after another character, Ghost (Charithra Chandran). She’s a high-level asset that lots of people want dead or captured.
Lucas is sent to capture Ghost by his former lover and federal agent, Katherine Brunt (Katee Sackhoff). She told Lucas this was his way back into the agency and to have him removed from the blacklist he’d been placed on. He’s to board a plane and capture Ghost alive. Only one problem… The plane is full of assassins looking to kill Ghost.
The film is chaotic fun. It’s reminiscent of films such as Kill Bill, Bullet Train, and Nobody. There’s fast action, blood, and turn-your-head-away moments. It was so much fun!
But, as you know, movies don’t have to be just fun. They can be learning tools. Fight Or Flight is no different. Prep for takeoff, we’re flying toward Reel Leadership.
Quotes And Leadership Lessons From Fight Or Flight
1. Great leaders explain situations:
Fight Or Flight opens with a chaotic scene on an airplane. People are fighting, there are bodies everywhere, and then there’s the gaping hole in the side of the aircraft.
What happened next drew gasps from the audience members at our local Celebration Cinema theater. One of the men fighting was sucked through the open hole. He fell out of the airplane and dropped…
We cut to the next scene. There’s text showing “12 hours earlier.”
The movie drew you in with the opening salvo. Quick action, chaos, and something mysterious. But they knew audience goers needed more than that. They needed an explanation.
You know who else needs an explanation? Your people. The people you lead.
When you act or tell someone else to do something, they’re not mindless robots. They’re living, breathing people who look for answers.
Help them to understand why you’re asking them to do what they’re doing.
2. Aaron Hunter (Julian Kostov):
I’m as confused as you are.
We’re led to believe Katherine is still part of the government agency she and Lucas had worked for. This goes for Aaron, Kyle Robinson (Jyuddah Jaymes), and Paul Simmons (Willem van der Vegt). Katherine walks into a room with the three men just as crap hits the fan. Aaron had just told Kyle and Paul that he didn’t want Katherine to know just yet.
Guess what happens next? Katherine walks into the room.
Aaron tells Katherine he’s just as confused as she is. He’d just learned of the information but was trying to sort it all out.
There will be times when you’re just as confused as your team. You may not have all the information, have just begun to hear of a crisis, or be entering the unknown.
It’s okay to admit you don’t know or you’re confused. Being able to say this helps your team relate to you. They don’t know everything. Neither do you.
3. Look for the tiny clues:
Aaron is reviewing footage of a hit Ghost had done. The hit hadn’t gone as planned and there was mass chaos.
Then Aaron notices something. There’s a small trail of blood on the road. It appears a bullet had hit Ghost.
The blood droplets were tiny. Yet, they were a huge breakthrough in finding out who she was.
We all like to look for the big clues. The ones that stare us right in the face. They’re the easy ones to see.
These clues can get us rolling, but they won’t get us to the finish line. It’s the small, subtle clues that will help you accomplish your mission.
Look for the tiny things that can point you in a new direction. These small clues will be game-changers.
4. Lucas Reyes:
What am I doing here?
Lucas calls Katherine after accepting to take on the mission. He demands to know what she wants from him. What he’s supposed to do!
He doesn’t have all the answers. He doesn’t know the next steps. But he wants to.
Those you lead want to know what they’re doing. They want to know what is expected of them.
Are you willing to give them those answers? Are you willing to help them understand what’s expected?
Don’t leave your people in the lurch. Fill them in. Give them the deets.
The more they know the WHY and WHAT, the more they can do.
5. Stop with the platitudes:
Lucas boards the plane and sits beside Cayenne (Marko Zaror). He is an assassin sent to kill Ghost.
Cayenne is also annoying.
He begins to spout platitudes. They sound intriguing and insightful. But they’re hollow.
After a while, Cayenne sounds stupid.
Guess what? We sound the same when we spout off hollow platitudes.
Sure, they may sound cute, inspiring, or motivational. They’re not when they’re used too often, too rapidly.
Stop using platitudes in situations that don’t call for them.
6. Beware of impostors:
After Lucas killed Cayenne in the airplane bathroom, airline employees Isha (really Ghost) and Royce (Danny Ashok) begin to knock on the bathroom door, telling Lucas he needs to come out. They’re also with a Sky Marshal (Bálint Adorjáni).
Later in the movie, Lucas finds the body of the real Sky Marshal in the cargo hold. The one everyone thought was the Sky Marshal wasn’t! He was an impostor.
We’ve got to beware of impostors in leadership. It could be a false leader or teacher. It could also be a false employee.
In leadership, you may find impostor leaders without the knowledge, expertise, or experience to lead well. In employees, you may have employees who falsified their applications.
In both situations, you have to beware!
7. Stop discounting women:
Lucas thought Ghost would be a man. He was looking at the manifest list and fellow passengers but really looking at the male passengers.
Guess who also looked for a male to be Ghost? The other assassins. They all expected Ghost to be a male.
They discounted Isha because they didn’t expect a woman to be the target.
We often discount women in leadership. We think they don’t have the knowledge, skills, or cajones to lead.
We’re wrong. They do.
If you have a great candidate for leadership who’s a woman, give her a shot.
8. Small businesses are often chaotic:
The whole movie was chaotic. Why? Because most of it took place on an airplane.
A confined space made for intense action sequences. People couldn’t move into less confined areas. Everything was amplified because of the limited space.
Small businesses offer a similar situation. They’re tiny, quick, and chaotic.
You’re trying to move the small business in the direction it should go. To move the people, you would think it would be easy. There’s not a lot of them.
However, people often wear lots of hats in a small business. Small business is chaotic when you have to move, remove, or replace an employee.
Be ready for your small business to be chaotic.
9. Ghost/Isha:
You asked if it was a weapon. In the wrong hands, yes.
We discover Isha isn’t the villain. She’d actually been traumatized as a child and was trying to fight child trafficking rings. To do this, she built a supercomputer that could hack into any encrypted coding.
Lucas discovered this and asked Isha if the device was a weapon. Her answer, the supercomputer is a weapon in the wrong hands.
Do you know what else is a weapon in the wrong hands? A leadership position.
People can abuse their position if they’re not the right person for the position. There are those out there looking to be labeled a leader so they can get the fame, accolades, and pay that goes along with it.
These are the people who will weaponize leadership.
10. Stop looking for your next scheme:
Planes are piloted by pilots, right? The aircraft in Fight Or Flight is no different. Two pilots (Sanjeev Kohli and Declan Baxter) were flying the plane on this fateful flight in the movie.
After they hear the legendary Ghost is on the plane, they begin talking amongst each other. They talk of Captain Sully and how he landed an airplane on the Hudson River. He got a book deal, a movie, and more.
Maybe they could be just as successful! Their scheme was hatched.
We might call this the shiny object or squirrel syndrome. We see someone else do something mindblowing, amazing, or new. Our minds begin to race with how we can do the same or something similar.
We’ve got to stop chasing the next piece of cheese in the mousetrap. We’ve got to begin doing work that matters.
Stop chasing the next scheme.
