Red Eye (No Spoilers)

So after mentioning it in my 12 Movies Meme the other day, then after dropping off Brad at the airport, I had a strange craving to watch Red Eye again.

Lisa is the manager of a fancy-pants hotel in Miami. On her way from Dallas to Miami, she meets Jackson in line at the airport. With their late flight already delayed they share a drink at the bar only to discover once they board the plane that they're sitting next to each other. Coincidence? Not so much.

After loads of casual flirting and chatting, the plane takes off and Jackson's true colors start to show. He is involved in an assassination attempt on the Secretary of Homeland Security, who just happens to be checking into Lisa's hotel in a matter of hours. Jackson tells Lisa to call her hotel and authorize the Secretary be moved from his regular suite to another more assassination friendly locale in the hotel. If she doesn't, her father will surely die.

(WARNING: I'll try to keep this from being a Cillian Murphy drool fest, but I can't guarantee things won't quickly dissolve into that.)

So Red Eye is far from being a great movie, but for what it is, it's pretty entertaining if you're willing to suspend all logic. The two dynamic leads do it for me. Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams have a great playful chemistry that they equally match when things get serious. I loved Cillian's charming, mysterious stranger in the beginning that quickly turned deathly chilling in the blink of an eye. Of course if it were me, I'd be too hypnotized by those blue eyes of his to realize my family was being threatened, but Lisa seems to freak out for some reason. Rachel McAdams does justice to the ready-to-please Lisa who, after a past traumatic experience, has become a tough, resourceful chica. She's hardly a badass in the beginning as she does the believable girly thing and cries and begs Jackson to not hurt her father or force her to aid in a murder. Alas, her several attempts to thwart the assassination plot go awry, as Jackson is no inept killer.

The film starts out as a psychological thriller, with Jackson simply threatening Lisa with words. In a post 9/11 world, with all the security measures for air travel in place, I still get a little paranoid when on a plane. Red Eye attempts to play on that paranoia, by trapping Lisa next to a man without a gun or a knife, but a cellphone in pocket that with one call could kill her loved ones. When you're trapped that high in the air where 911 doesn't reach, what are you going to do?

The movie plays out this way for the first hour, till the plane lands and Jackson chases Lisa to her father's house, where the rest of the film dissolves into a horror of sorts. Lisa and Jackson play cat-n-mouse in her childhood home: upstairs, downstairs, knives, bats, guns, hiding behind doors, climbing out windows, running, falling down, and so on. The feel of the movie completely shifts at this point, which was slightly disorienting.

Thankfully though, Red Eye never outstays its welcome. Clocking in at 85 minutes, Wes Craven goes from the introduction to the suspense to the action to the resolution with speedy ease. Nothing feels rushed or left out, nor is there an overabundance of action sequences or character development. It is what it is: a light, popcorn flick with a hot villain.

Red Eye is so to the point, its script is probably as long as this review.

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