Red Eye

Red Eye is sort of cock-eyed

Official Red Eye Site
Thriller
Starring Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox, Jack Scalia
PG-13 (for some intense violent and disturbing scenes and language)
Running Time: 85 Minutes
Released:August 19th, 2005



2 Out Of 5 Bites

by Glenn Johnson

Scheduled for its late-summer season arrival, Red Eye seems to quietly touch down unannounced, and after having watched it, it exits just as lightly.

Director Wes Craven almost didn't take on the project due to: 1) completing another film and, 2) an impending marriage. The movie sometimes feels as if it were second-or-third-thought. Red Eye didn't seem sure enough of itself to rest its laurels on being either the hip, summer, teen-scream genre or something more mysteriously serious and deeper. Some elements to the plot just weren't plausible, but the performances from Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy are enough to keep these and other foibles from totally gouging out the film's namesake.

McAdams (Lisa) is a successful hotel manager trying to get back home to Miami on a late flight when she happens across Murphy's character, Jackson Rippner. At the airport, the two exhange some pleasantries and oddities over drinks and as if his name wasn't hard enough to swallow, they are somehow paired together as seatmates on the plane. She's the driven and beautiful career-burdened loner who begins to take a chance and open up a bit to this beguiling stranger, who, in due time, makes her pay minutes later with a consciousness-sacrificing head-butt. That's about as much as he reveals about himself before McAdams' personal terror-in-the-skies unfolds.

What we do know of Rippner is that he's crafted this whole encounter with Lisa to force her to comply with an assassination plot of a government official. And for maybe the first hour, the movie doesn't exact a head-butt or a throat-grip, but it does manage to accost interest. That is until you realize how much of a wuss the script made Rippner. Although he can take an impromptu, in-flight ink-pen tracheotomy and still chase Lisa on foot and wind up on time at her door......he still doesn't prove to be much of a challenge to her. The movie expends enough effort to foreshadow and prove her wiry determination and bravado that- other than the convenient script- one doesn't presume anything put in her way is going to be much of an obstacle.

Red Eye assumes a more coy air of cleverness than can actually be afforded it. Technical aspects don't always arrive on time in the terminal of reality and side characters such as Lisa's father aren't given enough attention for us to care more about them.

But Murphy's pug-nosed pugnacity in Red Eye and recently- Batman Begins- suits him very well as cinema's quintessential and emerging bad-guy to have. All in all and subtracting the last twenty minutes or so, he and McAdams are worth watching together.