PG-13 | 1h 25min | Thriller, Suspense, Action | 2005
Just twice in his 39-year, 24 feature film career, did the late Wes Craven stray from his wheelhouse. The first of these, “Music of the Heart” from 1999, was an underwhelming musical drama starring Meryl Streep, Angela Bassett, and Gloria Estefan, which thoroughly tanked at the box office.
The second was the 2005 “Red Eye,” a taut action thriller cut clearly from the Alfred Hitchcock cloth that took in over $96 million worldwide against a $26 million budget.
“Red Eye” was the fourth straight (after “Mean Girls,” “The Notebook,” and “Wedding Crashers”) critical and commercial hit for Rachel McAdams, who stars here as Lisa, a frazzled Miami hotel manager trying to get back home after attending a funeral in Dallas.
Meet Cute
At a Love Field airport bar, Lisa exchanges small talk with Jackson (Cillian Murphy), a flirty and smooth (but not-too-smooth) talking fellow traveler also headed for Miami. As it turns out, not only are Lisa and Jackson on the same flight, their seats are next to each other. This was not mere happenstance.Not long after the plane takes off, Jackson’s unthreatening demeanor flips from breezy and amiable to calculatingly icy, and it becomes clear that he plans on pressuring Lisa to become an unwitting accomplice in the assassination of Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Charles Keefe (Jack Scalia).
To prove he means business, Jackson shows Lisa the monogrammed wallet belonging to her father Joe (Brian Cox, the patriarch in “Succession”), which he stole earlier in the day. Jackson also provides Lisa bits of minutiae she revealed earlier that proves Joe is being monitored, and if she doesn’t get with the program, her father will die.
Meat and Potatoes
As with the bulk of Hitchcock’s best thrillers (“Spellbound,” “Dial M for Murder,” “Rear Window,” “North by Northwest”), screenwriter Carl Ellsworth (also “Disturbia,” based on “Rear Window”) doesn’t complicate things by tossing in any superfluous or unnecessary details. It is a great example of basic “meat and potatoes” story construction—at least for the first two acts.When taking place at the airport and on a plane, “Red Eye” is pitch perfect. The cloistered space and confined quarters ratchets up the suspense, often to uncomfortable (but welcomed) levels. Jackson regularly warns Lisa that if she tries to signal or tip-off the flight crew, Joe will die, but Lisa, quickly recognizing she holds the trump card, plays it for all it’s worth.
Said trump card is the key to the entire enterprise. Jackson’s principal demand is that Keefe’s room at Lisa’s Miami hotel be changed that will make the assassination far easier to pull off. Thanks to a key scene between Lisa and her underling Cynthia (Jayma Mays), this change is relatively easy to facilitate, but also raises the suspicions of Keefe’s security personnel.
Once the plane lands, one of the two leads exits before the other “Red Eye” takes a slight downward tick. The previous cat-and-mouse/spider-and-fly construct dissipates and is replaced with a lesser imaginative, but still engaging, action thriller.
The chemistry between Ms. McAdams and Mr. Murphy is still strong, but the film itself takes on a different air, not unlike what took place in the last act of “Red Dragon” (2002), the remake of “Manhunter” (1986), where Mr. Cox appeared briefly as serial killer Hannibal Lecter.
Even with its minor flaws, “Red Eye” is still head and shoulders above what currently passes as gripping action thriller material. Craven exhibited a level of storytelling acumen here mostly absent in the remainder of his filmography.
Aftermaths
Sadly, for Ms. McAdams, “Red Eye” represented her career zenith, at least as a leading lady. She had the good fortune of appearing in multiple installments in two high-performing action franchises (“Sherlock Holmes” and “Doctor Strange”) and received her sole career Oscar nomination for best supporting actress as a reporter in the 2015 Best Picture winner “Spotlight.”Earlier this year, Ms. McAdams enjoyed something of a comeback with a supporting role in the critically acclaimed box office clunker “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.”
For the Irish-born Mr. Murphy, time has been far kinder. For a decade, he played the lead in the wildly popular TV crime series “Peaky Blinders.” He had a small but significant recurring role (as Scarecrow) in director Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” trilogy, two others in Mr. Nolan’s “Inception” and “Dunkirk,” and as the title lead in Mr. Nolan’s recent “Oppenheimer,” a movie I’m quite certain will be nominated for double-digit Academy Awards including Best Lead Actor.
