Film Reviews

Red Eye

• Rating:
• Director: Wes Craven.
• Starring: Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox.
• Details: US / 85 mins (12A).

After attending her grandmother's funeral in Texas, hotel manager Lisa (McAdams) takes the red-eye flight back to Miami. She finds herself sitting beside Jackson Ripner (Murphy), who calmly informs her that her father (Cox) will be killed unless she helps him to carry out an assassination on the new head of Homeland Security, who just so happens to be staying at Lisa's hotel. Wes Craven's latest movie is more psychological thriller than horror, and for the first hour provides an intriguing build-up during which McAdams and Murphy play cat-and-mouse. Leaving aside the obvious plot-hitch (when it's a matter of life and death, with your parent's life on the line, few people would prevaricate in the way Lisa does on behalf of a stranger), the two-hander works very well, with Murphy in superb form as the menacing stranger: it's personalised terrorism in a slick, polished and streamlined narrative. Unfortunately things go a little pear-shaped when the flight finally touches down; the movie turns into a bog-standard chase-and-scream number, and then plummets into the realms of the unintentionally hilarious for a risible finale that seems to have a personal investment in making everyone involved appear totally ridiculous, but particularly McAdams, who at the height of the climax gets to deliver the immortal line: "Where's your male-driven fact-based logic now, Jack?" From an entirely acceptable (if riddled with plot-holes) cat-and-mouse tale to whizz-bang Tom and Jerry japery in minutes flat: such is the state of play in Hollywood today.

Review by Declan Burke