August 19, 2005 | Alfred Hitchcock might have recognized a kindred spirit in fellow filmmaker Wes Craven had he lived long enough to see Hitchcock, you may recall, who contemptuously dismissed “the plausibles” – his derogatory term for literal-minded spoilsports who carp about coincidence and logical inconsistency – and blithely admitted that most of his movies could not withstand the scrutiny of what he called “icebox logic.” To quote the Master of Suspense: “You see my movie, you enjoy it, you go home, you get ready for bed, you go down to the icebox for a little snack, the light comes on, and you say, ‘Wait a minute. That didn’t make sense.’ Well, I don’t care.”
Trust me on this one: Craven doesn’t care, either.
And neither will you, more than likely. Even during those stretches when you could fly a jumbo jet through the gaping holes in Carl Ellsworth’s screenplay, Red Eye remains a slick, sleek and sensationally well-paced popcorn flick that will keep you precariously perched on the edge of your seat while you willingly suspend disbelief.
The movie represents a change of pace for Craven, a director best known as a fang-in-cheeky horror meister (A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Scream franchise). Here he smoothly shifts gears to employ a different brand of scare tactics, cunningly exploiting our post-9/11 paranoia about air travel and homeland security while playing fast and loose with a standard-issue damsel-in-distress scenario.
Right from the start, as he does the dramatic equivalent of taxiing down the runway during expository scenes, Craven shrewdly amps the action with rapid-fire cutting and a quick-serve sense of foreboding. Stressed-for-success Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams), manager of a Miami luxury hotel, idly chats with the affably hunky Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy) while passing time in a Dallas airport lounge before boarding a weather-delayed flight back home. Once on board the plane, she’s pleasantly surprised to see she’s seated next to the handsome (albeit weirdly named) stranger. After a shaky take-off, however, she’s subjected to a series of rather less pleasant jolts.
As they fly through the unfriendly skies, Rippner wastes little time in revealing his true colors: He’s a cold-blooded operative with murder on his mind. To facilitate an assassination, he tells Lisa to change the room reservation for the targeted VIP who’ll be registering at her hotel in just a few hours. If she doesn’t call her overworked underling and order the room switch, he will call an associate who just happens to be lying in wait outside the home of Lisa’s divorced father (Brian Cox).
Much of Red Eye is a skillfully extended cat-and-mouse game inside the claustrophobic confines of a commercial airliner. That the cat remains in such close proximity to the mouse for so long a period only serves to make the clammy tension – and, occasionally, the verbal and physical violence – all the more unsettling. The well-cast leads – McAdams as a resourceful heroine with unexpected reserves of grit, Murphy as the dreamy-eyed killer who won’t take no for an answer – play impressively well with and against each other in close quarters. And all the while, Craven stokes the suspense machinery with a cleverly variegated mix of tight close-ups and stealthy camera glides.
Everything builds to a turning point that requires the audience to hastily digest some last-minute revelations, and then accept a startling turnaround that sends the movie speeding off in a different direction. Once you’re past the turbulent transition, however, you can enjoy the final reel of Red Eye as a somewhat more conventional but excitingly over-the-top, beat-the-clock thrill ride. Craven piles absurdity atop improbability with impudent gusto, and even gets a few welcome laughs by repeatedly indicating that a distressed damsel is by no means defenseless damsel. Long after the final credits roll, and you’re raiding the refrigerator, you’ll be able to pick apart the plot. While you’re actually flying high with Red Eye, however, it’s very easy to get swept away.
