Review: Red Eye

Note: This review was contributed by Ryan Stewart.

Is the importance of the box office on the decline? Probably so, as evidenced by the fact that tinseltown’s prime movers have not yet gifted Rachel McAdams a plum role in an above-board feature. It has to happen sometime. She, along with Lauren Ambrose, is one of the five most interesting young actresses around, and she would seem to be Julia Roberts’ natural inheritrix, only with more earthy beauty and without that buffalo-fried, I-done-passed-the-GED-ma wingnut smile.

Wes Craven's trajectory to the top has not been as inevitable. He began with vomitive fare like Last House on the Left, which would seemingly delegitimize any director, but he survived and moved on to the Invincible Killer genre with A Nightmare on Elm Street and its offspring. Written off in some quarters, he had a late career revival with the genre vinaigrette film Scream, equal parts comedy and slashery. With Red Eye, he's turned in a similar, yet different direction, by giving us two genre movies attached at the hip, a la From Dusk Till Dawn. I was entertained by the first and bored by the second. 

The first half of Red Eye is tight as piano wire. It’s a Killer-In-Control movie, where the villain arrives at your doorstep with a fully realized plan, and expects you to do nothing more than punch a button or make a phone call, and in exchange he will make a call to stop the ticking bomb under your daughter's tricycle, or something like that. The second half of the movie is - and this is not a lazy description - Scream 4; it has everything except the original actors from the series. Craven seems to have acquired a taste not only for combining the DNA of different movie genres, but also for trying to top his own work.

McAdams plays a high-heeled hotelier stuck in a Dallas airport terminal, where she encounters the improbably named Jackson Rippner, played by Cillian Murphy. At first he makes like a fellow traveler, but once the plane is in the air he reveals himself as the middle-manager of a terrorist network planning a cabinet-level assassination. As the go-to girl of the ultra-posh hotel, McAdams happens to know the room number of the targeted cabinet member, and can have the room moved around at will. If she doesn't comply, Rippner will have the people waiting outside her father's house move in and kill him.

Cillian Murphy makes a great choice to play a pitiless villain, with his hemorrhaging blue-kool-aid eyes and herky-jerky body talk. I don’t think anyone was fooled by this film’s teaser trailer which tried to convince us that romantic comedy was afoot. Murphy just doesn’t have the face for it. And Wes Craven has the skills to thump our expectations early on, as when Murphy's character responds to McAdams’ sass by simply punching her lights out. What, you expected a cold-blooded terrorist to suffer lip? There’s a palpable tension that exists during the cat and mouse game that unfolds after that moment. Voices can barely be raised, lest the other passengers get a whiff of the alarming situation going on.  

But before the punch that puts the kibosh on the romance, there’s a sick-funny little scene that comes immediately after Murphy reveals his duplicity. McAdams quickly asks the obvious: “You’re not going to blow up the plane, are you?” He re-assures her that he is, in fact, interested in surviving this ordeal. This movie is nostalgic for the days of the secular psycho. The exchanges that follow between McAdams and Murphy remain somehow believable, thanks to the economy of their dialogue and Craven’s preference for quick, to-the-point scenes. Overall, there are more than a few little biting scenes in this film that keep the auto-pilot at bay.

Unfortunately, the plane scenes are too fulfilling for their own good. We in the audience know that the fun will be over once the plane is grounded; movies where characters have to whisper in cramped spaces are always more compelling than ones where the world is their playground. Restricting a director to a confined space is, in fact, sometimes the best way to get something out of them. Overall, a lot of goodwill is built up during the movie’s impressive middle-half, and you expect a third act that’s going to be at least serviceable, if by-the-numbers.

But this film’s third act is, really, really by-the-numbers. And I certainly didn't expect it to turn into a carbon copy of earlier Wes Craven footage. Maybe I should have, though. Craven has been trying to shoot the ultimate Chasing the Killer Through the House scene for a while now; he attempted it in all of the Scream movies, as well as other films. He apparently believes there's a filmmaking perfection to be had there - careful observers will notice the signature shots he's been tinkering with for years, such as a woman crawling out of frame, on her side. Someone quick – tell me there’s not a chase scene in Music of the Heart.

 
One final note: It’s a given in movies of today that any woman can best a man in a physical struggle, provided she closes her eyes tightly and makes a sacrifice in her mind to the Gods of Girl Power. In this movie, Rachel McAdams’ sacrifice comes in the form of an embarrassing revelation to her current attacker – that she was once raped by a thug with a knife and made a promise to herself – nay, a vow! – that she would never be victimized again. We can practically see the muscles flowering under her white blouse as she spins her tale. When you contrast this leitmotiv with how women fared in Craven’s 70s horror films, it provides an interesting example of how far a filmmaker can stretch his career if he’s willing to roll with the new.