Red Eye

Synopsis: Lisa (Rachel McAdams) finds herself on a plane seated next to Jackson (Cillian Murphy), who demands she utilise her powers as a hotel manager to aid in the assassination of a controversial politician. If she doesn't comply, Jackson will order the murder of her father.

At 82 minutes, Red Eye is a bare-boned thriller, which never stops to take a breath but also, as a result, fails to give us a great deal of insight into much of anything. The motives behind the assassination are vague at best, and Murphy's character is barely fleshed out - when his motives appear to change towards the end, his character seems inconsistent rather than complex.

From start to finish, a series of minor annoyances for the audience ultimately build up to major frustration. When Lisa is 'kidnapped' in a full passenger airline, the stage was set for some carefully crafted suspense, with clever nastiness by Jackson and equally clever responses by Lisa. Instead, Jackson seems unprepared and strangely indulgent to her, then resorts several times to blatant violence which, miraculously, not one passenger either sees or hears. There is an excellent sequence in the plane's bathroom, where the claustrophobic terror of Lisa's situation is combined well with genuine menace from Murphy. But this is a disappointingly isolated moment.

The finale is reasonably exciting although utterly predictable and the final showdown between Lisa and Jackson is weakened significantly by a plot device which may have been intended to make Jackson seem more creepy but instead makes him seem pathetic and invokes more laughter than screams.

If it wasn't for the radiant Rachel McAdams, this film may have deserved a trip straight to your local video store. But the 'next-big-thing' lives up to the hype, bringing real class to a script that didn't deserve her. She slides from sweet daughter to terrified hostage to fighter with ease, doing her best with a character which she has no time to develop.

Red Eye has the cast and a director in Craven, a master of the horror genre, to be a tight, intelligent suspense film, but a lazy script has resulted in a B-grade thriller which looks better than it really is.

 

 

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