Red Eye

The genius of American horror master Wes Craven, if you want to call it that, boils down to his remarkable ability to remake the same movie continuously for almost 30 years. Sure, there have been some departures along the way...Music of the Heart, the inner-city-kids-learning-violin movie was hardly typical Craven, and The Serpent and the Rainbow diverges markedly from the other films on his resume.

But, basically, Craven only bothers to actually create 1/3 to 1/2 of an original movie, a set-up, and then relaxes and lets the formula play itself out. There's always some kind of killer menace on the loose, a setting or two in which the characters have the illusion of safety, and then a chase to the death.

Red Eye, his second feature of 2005 after the odious and largely reshot Cursed, follows this same tired trend, but does so in a devious, unpredictable kind of way. It's probably the smartest dumb movie of 2005.



I will say this for Red Eye...It's more focused on dialogue and mood than typical Craven schlock-fests. It belongs in the small sub-genre of the suspense thriller, the Assassin Ropes An Innocent Bystander Into An Elaborate Scheme. This is a long and storied genre, including such recent films as Michael Mann's Collateral and the forgettable mid-90's Johnny Depp vehicle Nick of Time.

Like Collateral, the film catches the audience off-guard by opening more like an observant human comedy than a tense nailbiter. Hotel manager Lisa Reisart (Rachel McAdams), on her way home from her grandmother's funeral, meets the friendly Jackson Rippner (Cillian "Scarecrow" Murphy) in the airport. They share a drink and a brief chat, and find themselves seated next to one another on their flight.

Craven wisely doesn't rush the film's opening, but instead gives the actors time to breathe and establish themselves. The effect of lulling the audience into a false sense of security with Jackson and Lisa is hampered only by Marco Beltrami's obnoxious, intrusive score. Didn't anyone tell him this was supposed to be a taut thriller and not a slasher movie? Does he think he's scoring House of Wax 2 or something?

Once Craven springs the twist - without giving too much away, Jackson aims to do harm to a man staying in Lisa's hotel and needs her for his plan to come off - the movie shifts into some pretty tightly-coiled suspense. Jackson has a man at the home of Lisa's father (Brian Cox, in this movie for absolutely no good reason), putting her in a seemingly-hopeless position, but she has a deep well of resentment and anger that may end up overpowering his grand schemes.

Craven emphasizes not just the innate claustrophobia of the Coach section on an airplane (particularly a turbulent night flight in the midst of a storm), but the paranoid tenor on planes overall post 9/11. Lisa's under considerable strain, but even worse than the threats coming from Jackson is the need to keep a silent, pleasant demeanor for everyone else on the plane who is looking for a reason to get nervous.

The usual cat-and-mouse sort of material goes well for a while, and then we arrive at the moment of truth. The plane lands, Lisa makes a revelation that she will no longer be a victim, and the movie goes into (please pardon the pun...) auto-pilot.

Remember Passenger 57, with Wesley Snipes? The trailer promised an action film set entirely on an airplane, with Wesley fighting some kind of terrorist or something. Then you saw the movie, and they kept landing the plane to get out and have a fight scene. It was ridiculous. They'd come up with any lame excuse to get the characters out of the plane, when the whole point of the movie was supposed to be that it was an action movie set on a plane!

That's kind of how the final third of Red Eye feels. (And that's a substantial part of the movie, because the whole this is less than 80 minutes.) All this well-plotted, clever material winds up serving a really dumb extended chase/fight sequence that's boring because it's so familiar. Craven gets his characters into a house that's undergoing renovations and gives Jackson a butcher knife and an ability to apparently die but then come back to life and continue fighting. He chases Lisa around and around, she screams, he falls down stairs...It goes on and on like this, and starts to feel like a "Tom and Jerry" cartoon.

There are a lot of great touches throughout Red Eye. I liked the way Jackson's team of assassins hides their weapons - it's kind of a Sam Fuller, Pickup on South Street touch. And McAdams and Murphy do great work, not only as the steely heroine and her antagonist, but even in the first 10 minutes, as two people who meet up randomly and hit it off together. Murphy had an amazing year, between this and Batman Begins and the apparently-terrific but unseen by me Breakfast on Pluto. He's really great at cold, disaffected menace.

But why oh why didn't they finish what they'd started? Why not at least try to develop a third act that's as smart and twisty as the first two? How about, next year, instead of making one really awful movie and one that starts off well but runs out of steam after 45 minutes...why not make one movie that's good the whole way through? Can we try that please?