Red Eye

You just gotta love it when a group of professional assassins has to rely on a hotel manager in order to carry out their supposedly ingenious plan.

All plot weaknesses aside, Red Eye was very entertaining and extremely suspenseful toward the end. Wes Craven certainly does know how to direct a thriller, but the conspiracy itself was disappointingly thin. However, the acting and direction were strong enough to pull me into the story and keep me highly interested.

Lisa (Rachel McAdams) is a supremely competent hotel manager who is traveling back home to Miami after her grandmother’s death. She is totally awesome and super, always friendly to everyone, and cool under pressure. Despite the fact that everyone in the audience has seen previews for this movie at least twelve thousand times and therefore already knows that this is not a romantic comedy but a thriller in which Cillian Murphy’s character, Jackson Rippner, is up to no good, the movie still spends a good 45 minutes on the setup. By this I mean that the audience is forced to watch in great detail, the process of going to the airport and boarding a plane. After watching Lisa wait in line to check in, wait in line to board, walk slowly up the aisle to her seat while noticing every single living person already sitting down, and finally watching Jackson help Lisa and another woman put their luggage into the overhead compartment, I began to worry that I was going to have to sit through the stupid safety video as well. It’s not as if flying isn’t already boring enough, so I’m really not sure why Wes Craven felt the need to drag this part of the film out. It does little for plot development aside from fostering some romantic tension between Lisa and Jackson, which then completely evaporates when the guy tells her that, by the way, he’s going to murder her father.

What I did like about the movie was that once the plane finally takes off, the tension is created right away. No sooner have they reached cruising altitude than Lisa is completely freaked out by what Jackson tells her of his purpose on the plane. He specializes in high profile assassinations, and in this case his associates are depending on Lisa in order to gain access to their intended target. One of Jackson’s associates is stationed outside Lisa’s father’s house, with orders to kill him if Lisa does not help them. The task that she must complete in order to save her father’s life is an extremely simple one to do, yet horribly difficult from a moral standpoint. Any decent person faced with the choice that she is given would have trouble doing it, and yet she has very little choice. The character is strong, however, so Lisa’s escalating struggles with her predicament are refreshing and fairly realistic, as Jackson maintains a rather firm grip of control over the situation.

The suspense is built up very well, and I was completely drawn into the story despite its many puzzling aspects. As I left the theater I quickly began to see some of its more glaring problems—the most obvious being that a team of ostensibly highly trained and intelligent killers would be unable to carry out an assassination without threatening a hotel manager with her father’s murder while she sits on a plane 35,000 feet in the air. Nevertheless, this movie was very thrilling, with strong acting that helped distract from the inherent plot weaknesses. I do recommend Red Eye, but it won’t hurt to wait for the DVD.