DVD Reviews

Red Eye

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Cillian Murphy
• Details: US, 85 mins, 12A.

Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) is a busy business woman, so busy in fact she hardly has time away from her demanding job as a hotel manager to attend her grandmother's funeral. However, she manages to make it and, on the return flight (the Red Eye, much cancelled due to weather conditions) she meets handsome, persuasive stranger, Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy). Up until now, everything that can go wrong, does, however, when Rippner pulls out her father's wallet and insists that she move a VIP guest at the hotel to another room for a hit - namely, William Keefe the deputy secretary of Homeland Security - things get positively weird for her. So there you've got it, she's 30, 000 feet in the sky with no where to run to - if she doesn't move Keefe her dad gets it. If she does move Keefe, ha and his entire family gets it. What's a girl to do? Well, if she has a remote, a girl can turn off this melodramatic, by-the-book, midair nonsense and watching something entirely different - like the effectively terrifying Wolf Creek. While McAdams and Murphy are more than competent (he's suitably chilling and she's convincingly scared) the whole thing smacks of watered down booze; no taste, no pleasure, little point.

Review by Elaine Reilly