Red Eye Review!!!
SYNOPSIS: While traveling from a funeral in Texas to her home in Florida, Lisa (Rachel McAdams) begins talking to an enigmatic stranger, Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy). She believes their meeting is purely coincidence until they board the plane...and find their seats next to each other. After takeoff, Jackson tries to blackmail Lisa-a hotel manager-into helping kill the Director of Homeland Security and his family in exchange for her father's life.
ANALYSIS: Wes Craven's first directorial outing since Scream 3 (last year's blink and you missed it Cursed doesn't count) throws our antagonist and protagonist into the most cramped of all vehicles-an airplane-and lets the plot unfold, complete with internal ticking clock. Red Eye was marketed as an airplane thriller in the same vein as Flightplan. The difference, though, is that the Jodie Foster film stayed aboard the plane for the duration of the film. Here, it simply serves as, literally, the launching pad for the plot.
Not that its a bad thing, per se, but when the action cuts to the ground and other people besides the leads, some of the suspense and thrill is lost. If we're supposed to sympathize and root for Lisa, then we need to be as claustrophobic as she is. We can't be zooming all around the southern United States and then back to the plane. It kills whatever sense of pacing and terror the production is trying to get the audience to feel.
That being said, Red Eye does what it sets out to do mostly very well...that is, until the end. Good lord...someone threw the script for Flightplan into a blender with the story for some 1980s Cold War action-adventure to cobble this together. As soon as the plane lands in Florida, Lisa is off to the races, trying to make sure her father is safe. So far, so good. But then she drives the truck she stole into his house and a very boring game of cat and mouse begins when Jackson finds her. This is like every other "what's behind the door" scary flick we've ever seen. And you're wondering where the 1980s Cold War reference came from, right? Well, there's some Russian guys who blow up the hotel room Jackson makes Lisa move the director to...with a rocket launcher...from the bay outside the hotel...a bay that has no other boats on it for miles.
Then there's the obligatory "people running while flames engulf them" shots...yadda yadda yadda. Had Red Eye ended with Jackson's death on the plane, this would have been a very good thriller. It would also have been just over an hour long. A middling movie as it stands; this could have been and should have been so much better...especially with Craven and Murphy attached.