Red Eye

It’s been a long time since The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) for director Wes Craven. Along the way he’s picked up a couple of decent credits along with a few shockers (the first Scream in 1996 was a good calling card, even if the franchise rapidly went downhill with 2 and 3, not to mention his wretched show Shocker). Whatever you think of Craven’s track record as a horror director – there’s many, including me, who feel he’s a bit over-rated – he’s done enough to claim a bust in the horror hall of fame.

It would be fairer to think of his latest outing, Red Eye, as a thriller rather than a horror exercise, partly because Craven and his producers were chasing a PG 13 rating. There’s not much in the way of violence or gore – a pen in the throat is about as good as it gets on a personal level, while a missile busting up a hotel suite represents the peak for general explosiveness. For much of the time, the plot is a two hander. We’re quickly introduced to sweet Rachel McAdams, a hotel executive, who’s about to leave her dad (Brian Cox) and catch the cattle class overnighter to Miami.

On the ground she bumps into a seemingly nice man (Cillian Murphy, bearing the dubious character name Jack Rippner), and then coincidence of coincidence, they get to sit next to each other on the plane. Of course Cillian is far too handsome and slick to be really nice, and besides he’s got these really weird bright blue eyes. You know poor Rachel is in for a turbulent ride, and sure enough Cillian quickly explains that there’s a man outside her dad’s house with orders to terminate him if Rachel doesn’t do as she’s told. Nor is it any coincidence they’re sitting next to each other in the two seater configuration – he knows a lot about her and her ways. Thereafter the pair bicker and banter with standard underlying sexual tension – Cillian wants Rachel to call her hotel and get a very important homeland security dude shifted from one suite to another, clearly with the intention of creating mischief.

The airplane phone is called into play, along with the toilet, as Rachel gets increasingly desperate in her attempts to get away from this sociopath, but of course he’s got all her moves covered – why she thinks writing a message about a bomb on the toilet mirror is a good strategy is a bit of a mystery, but it ensures they can do a little wrestling in the privacy of the bathroom (the cabin crew think the pair have attempted to join the mile high club, as you do). Eventually the plane lands, and the third act plays out the fairly obvious set up – Craven and the script by Carl Ellsworth play fair by showing us early a mysterious case planted in frozen fish, and by the end its contents are dragged out to do its thing. Dad stays in peril – he provides a convenient opening up by cutting away from the cabin action - and so does the homeland security dude, and everything is resolved with a bit of a bang.

Craven covers the action in a competent, slick style, without ever really trying to do anything other than deliver the story in a typical genre way. The characters are not particularly deep or subtle, but it’s probably a little more watch-able than Flightplan, if only because it doesn’t bother to get over the eighty minute mark, and has no more pretensions than being a basic popcorn mild shriek movie (you even get a ‘is he hiding behind the curtain’ routine, along with an inevitable 'one on one' showdown between fair maiden and throat affected sociopath).

The very busy these days Italian composer Marco Beltrami delivers a ‘by the numbers’ score which nonetheless cranks it up at all the right moments, thereby removing the need for any additional musical pickups designed to flesh out the soundtrack – in this sense, Craven remains true to a simpler time, when underscore was all that was needed or expected on a soundtrack. The result will interest Craven fans or thriller enthusiasts. At least you don’t need to waste much of your life to get from beginning to end, but equally it’s not a particularly substantial or pleasing effort, with the two hander nature of a lot of the first half requiring a little more intensity than either Rachel or Cillian can muster. They do well enough, but like the show itself, it would have been better if they could have pushed the envelope a little further … As for the extras, most of them consist of the kind of self congratulatory celebrations that now fill up discs (Craven the master) with only the way they built the plane on rockers and similar technical tricks of any real interest (yep, there had to be storms, you expected a thriller on a plane without a little rocking and rolling?)

 

Get free email now!