“Craven Puts the Fright in Flight”

The crown prince of horror, Wes Craven, brings us a claustrophobic airplane thriller dubbed Red Eye, a movie that cruises at high altitude and velocity when the jet is in the air, but gets bogged down with contrivances and conventional thriller shtick when it’s grounded. As would be expected, there are several terrifying moments (the head-butt scene on the plane is quite a jolt), but the performances are executed on auto-pilot and Craven’s stiff and straight-forward direction leaves little room for artistic interpretation.

Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams), people-pleasing manager of a ritzy hotel, is returning home to Miami from a business trip on a red eye flight. While the flight is delayed, Lisa meets a nice, young man named Jackson (Cillian Murphy from Batman Begins), who buys her a drink and engages her in small talk. As fate, and Craven, would have it, Lisa and Jackson end up seated next to each other and everything is pleasant until the plane reaches cruising altitude. Jackson reveals himself as a contract killer and Lisa is the lynchpin to his plan—all she has to do is call her hotel and arrange for a visiting politician and his family to be switched to a different room, where a rocket (launched from a nearby fishing boat) will take them out. Jackson’s leverage is a hit-man stationed outside Lisa’s father’s (Brian Cox) house. Lisa is forced to make the call, despite several failed attempts at evasion and deception, and she spends the rest of the movie running away from Jackson, while trying to save the politician, his family and her father.

Red Eye maintains its intensity throughout (except for the sluggish first act when passengers wait to board the delayed plane), but some colossal plot holes mar what otherwise could have been a first-rate, Hitchcockian thriller. For starters, why is it so important for Lisa to make the call herself…can’t they find someone who can mimic her voice or use a device that can fashion her previously-recorded words into intelligible sentences? Why is a hotel manager so crucial to terrorist plans? Further, why must they move the politician to a different room? Can’t a rocket be fired just as easily and accurately from a parked car as from an anchored boat? But here’s the kicker; wouldn’t it have been a lot easier for Jackson just to abduct Lisa on the ground and force her to call from her cell phone than to go through the expense, trouble and considerable risk of accosting her on a plane? And what about the corny, generic airline name…Fresh Air? It’s bad enough to see it emblazoned on the tail of the plane, but when the captain comes over the intercom and announces, “Thank you for flying with Fresh Air,” any intensity that had been building up to that point just evaporates in the sweltering Miami heat.

The climactic pursuit at movie’s end has been done so many times before in motion picture history, and a lot more skillfully in most cases, that the last half hour is a chore to sit through. The only unique element to the cookie-cutter, “man stalking woman” ending was when Lisa plowed the hit-man through the front door of her father’s house with a stolen S.U.V. Lisa’s father is dead weight (literally) in the climactic sequence, and, of course, the cops don’t show up until the bad guy is already dead.

Red Eye squanders Murphy’s excellent performance by defaulting to standard thriller fare that’s a lot less graphic than Craven’s typical Rated-R gore—this is horror lite. Advice to Lisa: next time take Dramamine before you board…you can’t be forced to make a life-or-death phone call if you’re out cold!

Rating; 2 1/2

Tags: Thriller