I can remember the first time I saw the trailer for Red Eye, nearly two months ago, being the first of four previews before Batman Begins. Chewing on a handful of buttery, yet stale popcorn and sipping from an oversized bucket of soda, I watched flashes of Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy sharing flirtatious conversation, becoming unlikely bedfellows in a tale shrouded in mystery. After the trailer ended I wasn’t exactly sure what I saw but was indifferent nonetheless; unlike many of the movie trailers that zip past audiences today, this one gave absolutely nothing away to what the movie was about. The only thing I knew was that it was confined to the cramped parameters of an airplane, the last place you could possibly think of setting any movie, let alone a suspense/thriller. Given the oft attempted and horribly executed tries at “closed quarter” movie making… skepticism was expected, nay demanded.
And so with skepticism entrenched like a furrowed brow, I sat for eighty-five minutes and watched. It was about ten minutes into the film that McAdams charming, yet troubled character Lisa Reisert slowly started excavating that skepticism. McAdams>, the rising star with dimples that carve out those perky, high cheekbones, complementing an ear-to-ear smile that’s inviting even when she plays a lonely workaholic, thick skinned yet torn apart by the divorce of her parents. It’s about another ten minutes when I find myself thoroughly engaged by Cillian Murphy’s misogynistic, methodical and downright creepy operative Jackson Rippner, a deceptively dervish one-eighty from the charming, blue eyed boy he offered when “courting” Reisert in an airport bar over a Sea Breeze moments prior.
The surprisingly taut script seems straightforward enough—Rippner provides Reisert with an ultimatum, placing the life of both her father(Brian Cox) and the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Charles Keefe (Jack Scalia) on a diligent phone call to move Keefe from his usual suite to the carefully plotted Suite 4080—but the suspense that dangles like a loose thread isn’t so much the script as it is the dynamic relationship that both Murphy and McAdams share, smushed together in those standard blue velvet airline seats. In many ways it’s Cillian Murphy resembling the bloodthirsty zombies he ran from in Danny Boyle’s cult hit 28 Days Later; it’s Rachel McAdams admirable vulnerability and underlying strength that allow for the panic button to be pressed, mashed and inevitably smashed.
Above all, the biggest surprise may not even be any of that. It could very well be that Wes Craven has a knack for directing suspense thrillers rather than spinning tales of teen murders by burnt boogey men and costumed clowns. The same man that has reinvented the horror genre on several occasions doesn’t break any new ground here, but he definitely pulls out the bag of ...
