Red Eye
Rated: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hour, 25 minutes
Directed by: Wes Craven
Starring:
Rachel McAdams - Lisa Reisert
Cillian Murphy - Jackson Rippner
Brian Cox - Joe Reisert
Even though the majority of the film takes place on a plane, a lot of terms to describe Wes Craven’s new thriller Red Eye starring Rachel McAdams (Mean Girls, Wedding Crashers) and Cillian Murphy (28 Days Later, Batman Begins) could aptly be described to cars. For instance, metaphors like “shiny but not much beneath the hood,” or “goes from zero to sixty in under a minute and then runs out of gas,” help provide an accurate description of the film’s major weakness. But let’s back up for those that haven’t seen the smart although slightly too revelatory trailer.
Lisa (McAdams) is on her way back to Miami after coming to Texas for her grandmother’s funeral. While she appears to be a calm, kind, confident hotel manager she’s actually hiding scars both literal and figurative (although honestly, when in a film is a literal scar not accompanied by an emotional one). With a delayed flight, she meets another kindly stranger, Jackson…sigh…Rippner (Murphy). Before I continue, this is a really dumb name and just because you acknowledge it as such in the film, it doesn’t stop it from remaining a dumb name. If you must acknowledge Jack the Ripper, then do it on the sly by calling the character Jack Mason which would allude to the theory that Jack the Ripper was actually a member of the Free-Masons. Anyway, Rippner turns out to not be the great guy that he appears as once they’re in the air he reveals the he needs Lisa to have one of her more prominent guests, the deputy for Homeland Security, moved to a different room so that he can be murdered. If Lisa does not comply, Jackson will kill her father (the once-ubiquitous Brian Cox).
So what we have here is a nice little thriller at 30,000 feet being carried by two talented young rising stars and directed by a seasoned professional. We also get a nice theme of male-female power struggle so the story has a bit of a brain as well. So how does it fall apart? Well, because after
Unfortunately, that’s not this film.
Red Eye is stuck in a cat-and-mouse game that despite the best efforts of McAdams and Murphy to add as much realism and intensity to the film as possible, never allows us to forget the inevitable outcome that all will be well and Lisa will win the day. It’s like a nice throwback to a old B-film thrillers except those films would have the balls to have an unhappy ending.
And the ending is where this film falls apart. Once the plane lands, Craven switches from trying to craft a taught thriller to his old slasher-film tricks of who’s hiding where. The gender-theme falls apart and both characters lose all personality as the film pretends like we don’t know who’s going to live and who’s not.
Red-Eye is a film in a big damn hurry. It’s only 85 minutes long and where it’s content to have a completely misleading first act (which I thought was great), it’s trying to shove the intensity of a slasher film into a thriller which really works better with the slow burn of suspense. While the lead actors do an admirable job of carrying the film, the director and the screenplay fail in embracing the genre and end up with a muddled product.
Words by
Matt Goldberg
9.14.05