Review: Red Eye (2005)

Red Eye (2005)

Rated PG-13 for some intense sequences of violence, and language

Score: 4 out of 5

Wes Craven was always hit-or-miss as a filmmaker, but it's impossible to argue that he ever fully, truly lost his touch. Every time he made a dud that looked like it might kill his career, he came right back with a movie that reminded people why he's considered one of the great modern horror filmmakers. Deadly Blessing, which got Ernest Borgnine a Razzie nomination, was followed by the cult-classic monster movie/DC Comics adaptation Swamp Thing. The Hills Have Eyes Part II, a dreadful cash-in sequel that he made solely for the money, was followed later that year by A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film that needs no introduction. After the troubled production of Deadly Friend came the unorthodox zombie film The Serpent and the Rainbow. After Shocker, a failed attempt to craft a new slasher icon like Freddy Krueger, came the biting suburban satire The People Under the Stairs. After the awful horror-comedy Vampire in Brooklyn came the classic horror-comedy Scream. After his second-to-last film, the corny '90s slasher throwback My Soul to Take, came his swan song, the entertaining '90s slasher nostalgia trip Scream 4.

And after Cursed, a reunion with Scream writer Kevin Williamson whose title turned out to be a good description of what production was like, came Red Eye, Craven's take on a feature-length episode of 24. It's a thriller rather than a pure horror movie, but it's one in which Craven is still playing in his wheelhouse, tightly focused on a battle of wits between its protagonist and its villain within the confines of a commercial airliner. Both of them make for excellent characters, thanks to both smart writing by Carl Ellsworth and strong performances by Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy, who carry most of the film with ease. And the story has a lot more going on than just the terrorist plot on the surface, particularly with regards to McAdams' character, in ways that are still all too relevant today. While Red Eye doesn't get as much press or love from fans as Craven's more explicitly horrifying films, it's still a nail-biter of a closed-circle thriller that packs both a great buildup and a great payoff.

Lisa Reisert is the manager of a Miami hotel who's just flown to Dallas to bury her father, and is stuck on a red-eye flight back home. At the airport, she meets a charming, handsome man named Jackson Rippner whose name even she recognizes as proof that his mother must have hated him -- and wouldn't you know, they have seats together on the same flight. Turns out Jackson deliberately arranged for that to happen. Because tomorrow morning, the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security arrives at Lisa's hotel, and Jackson is an international terrorist who's helping to orchestrate a plot to assassinate him, forcing Lisa to assist in his plans by using her status as the manager to arrange for the secretary's reservation to be moved to a room where he can be more easily targeted. If Lisa doesn't comply, well, Jackson has a man parked right outside her father's house sharpening his big, twelve-inch hunting knife.

Much of this film exists to serve as a showcase for the talents of its two actors, Rachel McAdams as Lisa and Cillian Murphy as Jackson. The film may use a picture of McAdams from the end of Mean Girls (specifically, of Regina's post-Plastics high school career on the field hockey team) to establish Lisa's backstory, but Lisa is about as far from Regina George as one can get. She's not only likable, she's shown to be haunted by something in her past underneath her successful, professional exterior, and without spoiling anything, it's something that leaves her especially vulnerable to Jackson's manipulations. Meanwhile, Murphy plays Jackson as something slimy, wearing a facade of a charming, handsome young man like it were a suit made from another man's skin, soon revealing himself to be a sexist creep underneath who has likely spent his entire life manipulating others, and proves to be really good at doing so to Lisa after spending eight weeks watching her. Who he's working for is secondary to him as a personality. Both are abnormal people under the surface, Lisa due to past trauma and Jackson because everything about him, including possibly his name, is a lie. Watching the film today, in a time when sexual assault and domestic abuse have become the national talking points that they weren't in 2005, the subtext was even more unmistakable than it was then: lurking beneath this film's story about terrorism is one about stalking and emotional manipulation, and a woman struggling to overcome it. Lisa spends the film constantly looking for ways to stay one step ahead of Jackson's machinations and save both her father and Jackson's target, and Jackson in turn is looking to make sure that Lisa isn't pulling a fast one on him, whether she's faking a phone call he has her make to her hotel or trying to warn the other passengers that he's a terrorist. The result was a film where both the hero and villain felt smart and crafty and even seemed as though they'd developed a twisted respect for one another, and I was fully invested in their games.

Behind the camera, Craven brings all of his skills from the world of horror movies to bear in making a tense thriller. The first twenty minutes are filled with everything that people hate about airports and flying, from delays to connecting flights to obnoxious passengers, all the better to set up the inside of the airplane as a place of fear. Watching this, I was constantly on the lookout for things that might cause Jackson to realize that Lisa was up to something, or which might make Lisa's job of trying to stop Jackson more difficult, most notably when a teenage boy loses the pen that he brought with him to draw some sweet art in his notebook (setting up one of the film's best scenes). The first hour had an excellent flow to it, building up the growing, increasingly thick tension between Lisa and Jackson in a way that leaves you thinking that anything could happen. The action leaves the plane in the third act, and while the shift was a bit jarring, Craven gets plenty of opportunity to show off his slasher chase chops, putting Lisa and Jackson into a game of cat-and-mouse through an airport and eventually Lisa's father's house in which the flow of the pursuit and battle changes multiple times but never lost my interest. If there was a weakness here, it probably came in the actual terrorist plot, the details of which are left vague to the point of merely being an excuse to get Lisa and Jackson together. Some exploration of why Jackson joined these guys could've lent some added depth to his character and made for an even more effective villain, perhaps juxtaposing his misogyny with the hateful, radical ideologies of any number of terrorist groups. That said, I don't blame Craven for not wanting to tie the bad guys down to any real-world groups, especially given what the public face of terrorism was in 2005; by leaving the terrorists ambiguous, the film becomes more timeless even with its references to the Department of Homeland Security.

The Bottom Line

The central plot is about as thin as could be, but doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. No, this is a film driven by its characters and rock-solid direction by a very on-his-game Wes Craven. This is one that deserves more recognition as one of the late filmmaker's hidden gems.