Red Eye (2005)

1/17/06

I am surprised to say that I ever found myself wanting to see a Wes Craven movie, but when I saw the expectations defying trailer for Red Eye, I was immediately sold on the film. Like the classic Hitchcock films of the early 6o's (Psycho, The Birds), Red Eye starts out as if it were a romance but then gets broadsided by seemingly alien events and becomes a completely different type of movie. Rachel McAdams, whose brunette hair in this film helps her come across as a more grounded actress, is Lisa Reisert a manger at a Mimi hotel who is returning home from Dallas, were she attended her grandmothers funeral. Cillian "creepy eyes" Murphey is Jackson Rippner, the apparently upstanding and charming man who Lisa meets in the airport when their flight is delayed. The two are 'luckily' seated next to each other on the plane, but the budding romance Lisa seems to be hoping for doesn't materialize, when Jackson revels himself to be infact a type of mercenary terrorist.

Jackson threatens Lisa with the death of her beloved divorced father, (at the hands of one of his associates parked across from his home in a BMW) if she doesn't call up her hotel (on one of those airplane phones) and switch the reservations of the soon to be arriving deputy director of Homeland Security, to a certain room in which a terrorist group would find it easier to assassinate him in. Red Eyes premise acutely works, the plot is well thought out and the film very exactly put together. All of the fellow passengers you meet at the beginning of the film have a part to play in the story, and the simple but elegant plotline is all the better for its quick pace and brevity. Minor comic relief is provided by Cynthia (Jayma Mays) as the hotels well meaning but flaky night clerk. Red Eye is great for what it is and comes highly recommended.