Red Eye Release Date: August 19, 2005 Starring: Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox Directed by: Wes Craven
PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 8/18/05)
Wes Craven has always had a knack for finding the hell in the mundane—a serial killer infiltrates your dreams, the guy you just slept with turns out to be a knife-wielding maniac—but it takes a special kind of sadist to set a thriller in coach class. That torment of screaming babies and greedy seatmates reserved for, well, everyone, is where the marvelously psychotic Cillian Murphy traps his prey, Rachel McAdams, by threatening her father’s life if she doesn’t make a call that will abet the murder of the Homeland Security Deputy Secretary.
Sounds like a run-of-the-mill power struggle, but Craven’s stripped-down story, sustained by the two appealing leads, is a taut terror. Murphy has a brilliant, scary charisma—his precise blend of crazy-sexy is simultaneously enthralling and terrifying. For her part, McAdams gives a gutsy performance that makes up for the 20 years Craven and his genre-mates have spent gleefully slaughtering promiscuous teenage girls onscreen.
Despite its premise, Red Eye doesn’t go within 100 yards of the implied politics of assassinating a Homeland Security official, much to the film’s benefit. We never find out who wants the man dead, or what his politics are, just that he, and his pretty wife and kids, deserve to live by virtue of being fellow human beings. Which is an odd and refreshing concept to see at the movies, especially compared to the disposability of anonymous life in pretty much any action or horror film. Red Eye packs only about 15 minutes of solid scary, but really, that’s about all the time a human heart can spend lodged in one’s throat. —Sara Brady
