Red Eye

A woman is kidnapped by a stranger on a routine flight. Threatened by the potential murder of her father, she is pulled into a plot to assist her captor in offing a wealthy executive.

AMG: Terror rides the night skies in this thriller from horror auteur Wes Craven. Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) is a young woman with more than her share of anxieties about flying. However, when circumstances demand she go to Miami, she gathers her nerves and books a seat on a late-night flight. Sitting next to her is a handsome and charming man named Jackson (Cillian Murphy), whom she already met in the airport, but once their jet is safely in the air, Lisa discovers he's not the pleasant traveling companion she imagined. Jackson is part of a terrorist cell plotting to kill the head of Homeland Security, and he's decided to draft Lisa into helping him. While Lisa has no interest in abetting Jackson's plan, he soon reveals he's holding a trump card — his compatriots are holding Lisa's father hostage, and will kill him if she doesn't cooperate. Red Eye was the first feature film credit for screenwriter Carl Ellsworth, who previously scripted episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess. — Mark Deming



AMG Review

Wes Craven's Red Eye is an efficient and professional claustrophobic thriller, boosted by a strong, simple premise (along the lines of Speed or Phone Booth) and the director's unassailable skill at creating suspense and sustaining tension. While the focus of the story is two passengers on a commercial flight engaging in a life-or-death battle of wits and will while seated beside each other, screenwriter Carl Ellsworth and Craven open things up by having other, minor characters just involved enough in the action, highlighting both Lisa's (Rachel McAdams) need to connect with an outsider to her ordeal and Jackson's (Cillian Murphy) need to keep her isolated on the crowded plane. Lisa, played for maximum sympathy and audience identification by McAdams, is a surprisingly rich character for such a film, and it's gratifying to watch her natural resourcefulness come to bear as she faces down her pragmatic captor. The way Jackson sees it, he's simply doing his job, and while Lisa's job requires her to salve egos and smooth over mishaps, Jackson arranges to have people killed. With his ice-blue eyes, Murphy is effectively charming and creepy by turns until the movie leaves the plane, at which point things get a bit too ludicrous (not that his elaborate plot is ever quite convincing to begin with) and his performance veers off in an unfortunate over-the-top direction as the cat-and-mouse finale becomes more entrenched in the tropes of the genre. The film's purposefully muddled politics don't help. Still, Red Eye offers an expertly made, enjoyably suspenseful movie experience. — Josh Ralske