| Product: |
Red Eye (DVD) |
| Date: |
13/05/07 (100 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Quick, exciting thriller
Disadvantages: Tame for Wes Craven
After the death of her grandmother, Lisa Reisert embarks on the homeward journey back to Miami, where she works in a major beachside hotel. In her absence, new recruit Cynthia is keeping an eye on things and, awkward customers notwithstanding, everything seems to be going fairly smoothly. If only the same could be said of the current status of air travel. Torrential rainfall has grounded some flights and delayed many others so, with time on her hands, Lisa finds herself taking cocktails in an airport bar. Having previously bumped into a young man named Jackson at the check-in desk, she is pleasantly surprised to find him in the same bar and the pair exchange life stories over drinks. The time passes quickly and before long, it's time to join the flight, where yet another coincidence prevails. Lisa finds herself sat next to the same man on the plane. It's a good job really. With severe turbulence on the way up and an inherent fear of flying, Lisa needs someone to distract her from the rigours of the take-off.
Jackson certainly provides a good distraction. He discusses the sad death of her grandmother. He talks about her father back at home in Miami. He talks about her job. He talks about his job. He talks about the influential executive William Keefe and he discusses how Lisa is going to help Jack kill him.
Sorry? What did you say?
Fasten your seatbelts please. This flight is about to get very bumpy….
Wes Craven, eh? He's a one. Legendary horror meister and purveyor of such classics as The Hills Have Eyes, The Last House on The Left, Scream and A Nightmare on Elm Street. But the horror legend's imagination ran dry many years ago and it's a long time since he directed anything even half good. His new ploy, therefore, is to change tactic and give the horror a miss. Surprised? Me too. Wes Craven is so synomymous with horror movies that I just kind of assumed that Red Eye would be a horror movie too. It is, in fact, a thriller. It's a simple one too - think Phone Booth meets Panic Room and you're a third of the way there. You're only a third though because those two films are far superior to this.
More Bruckheimer than Craven, the film opens as it means to go on. A thundering soundtrack accompanies underhand dealings in a fish market (I kid you not) where big fish are being used to conceal an assignment of something far more sinister. Switch to the airport where our heroine Lisa is introduced amidst a small supporting cast of fellow plane passengers, each of whom has a small part to play in the proceedings. More caricature than character, there is sweet little old lady who keeps interrupting at the most inconvenient moments. There are two college kids messing around and a little girl who will prove to be far more intuitive than any of her adult counterparts. It all feels more like a disaster movie than anything else to be honest, and you can't help thinking that Mr Craven would have had far more fun despatching them all in one imaginative way after another rather than let them live.
Red Eye is a story in three acts - a vaguely concealed attempt to put together a Hitchcock thriller. Act one is "introduction". This is the settling down for the audience where we watch Lisa walk unsuspectingly into a trap. Act two is "peril". This is where Lisa realises her plight and starts to get herself into a sticky mess. Act three is "action". This is where….well, you'll have to watch the film for yourself to fill in the missing blank there. I'm not going to give everything away, after all. In it's three parts, Red Eye does work very well. It's something that was hinted at in the (excellent) trailer that painted a picture of "rom-com" innocence before shattering us all with one simple revelation. Red Eye's simple, rapid structure means that the audience never really has time to get bored, even when the "action" is simply the dialogue between Lisa and her (unknown) captor. At around, one hour and twenty-five minutes in length, Red Eye simply doesn't have time to be anything else. Don't expect complex character / plot development here. This is "hit and run" from the outset.
The film doesn't stand up well to intelligent analysis. It is full of implausibility and those stupid assumptions that only Americans seem to make. Lisa Reihert is initially not an endearing heroine. Her tearful trembling and feeble protestations soon wear rather thin and much of the peril seems to be of her own making. Given what she is told by her captor, a simple solution, for example, would simply be to scream and go doolally. They're on a plane. What can he do? In this day and age, I'm rather convinced that the plane crew would be fairly responsive to such a threat. But she doesn't, opting instead to try and leave covert messages and give secret signals that you just know are doomed. Sigh. It gets worse later on, when America's homeland security team seems utterly incapable of just about everything. It's not long before the action gets going that you know it's time to turn your brain off.
But, strangely enough, when you do finally switch off the grey matter, Red Eye becomes a far more enjoyable romp. There is a certain element of suspense and, plausible or not, Lisa's plight does create the atmosphere that Craven was looking for. There are a couple of jumps and shocks and whilst the final scenes play out, some of the Wes Craven of old starts to come out again. Lisa's "get up and go" gets up and comes back and it all has a fairly satisfying air to it.
Cillian Murphy's Jackson Rippner (yes, that IS the character's name) is fairly effective. In aiming for the bad guy roles, Murphy has definitely made the right decision - his eerie eyes and strange features could never really be anything other than malevolent. Following his turn as the Scarecrow in Batman Begins he is once again a capable and enthusiastic menace and a good lesson in why it's never a good idea to talk to strangers. Rachel McAdams' turn as Lisa Reisert is less inspiring, although completely appropriate to the role. With her curly brown hair, sweet little eyes and cute little outfit, she might as well be wearing a "VICTIM" T-shirt and you can't fault her abilities to be both pathetic and assertive. Brian Cox's performance as Reihert's father is a small part of the film, memorable only really for the startling observation of how much weight the seasoned actor has lost.
If I had to describe the tone of Red Eye, I would say that it was rather like a Scooby Doo adventure. It all takes off pretty quickly, everyone runs around and gets in and out of danger. As the film draws to a close, all that is missing is one of those "Pesky Kids" kind of statements that the bad guy always makes in Scooby Doo, and the cycle would be complete. It's all completely removed from anything that Wes Craven would normally be involved in and whilst this doesn't inherently make it a bad film, you can't help thinking that something far more sinister could have been put together here.It's a likeable film, probably for all the wrong reasons, but not one that anybody should race out and see.
Summary: Eye eye
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