August 28, 2005

MOVIES: Red Eye (Wes Craven, 2005)

Quickly rising stars Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy star in this neatly efficient thriller. She's hotel executive Lisa; he's Jackson, the cute guy she meets at the airport while waiting for their delayed flight to leave. They wind up seated together on the plane, and he turns out to be a terrorist. The assistant director of Homeland Security is arriving at her hotel the next morning, and if Lisa doesn't arrange for him to be moved to a specific suite, thus facilitating his assassination, Jackson's colleague will kill Lisa's father.

Nearly half of the movie takes place on that plane, and director Wes Craven (along with cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman) do a nice job of creating a claustrophobic mood with lots of tight closeups. The screenplay by Carl Ellsworth is tightly constructed, with lots of early details that pay off nicely in the final act.

There are, as there always are in this sort of thriller, a few implausibilities. Lisa spends a fair amount of time after the plane lands running away from the very authorities whose help you'd think she'd be desperate for, and she turns out to be more proficient in hand-to-hand combat than one would expect a hotel executive to be, but that's part of the genre.

McAdams and Murphy both do better acting than this sort of movie normally gets, and there's great comic relief from Jayma Mays (in her first film) as the assistant who's running the hotel in Lisa's absence.

On the whole, a terrific popcorn flick.

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