Red Eye (2005) * * *

 

Directed by:  Wes Craven

Starring:  Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox, Jayma Mays, Robert Yeoman, Jack Scalia

The assassination the villains wish to pull off in Red Eye is needlessly complicated.  It involves firing a missile from a boat and blowing up the hotel room occupied by the Deputy Director of Homeland Security and his family.  But, that's not all.   It turns out the hotel manager Lisa Reisert (McAdams), who is taking a red eye back to Miami, is needed to authorize switching the director's normal room to one of the baddies' choosing to make it easier to launch the rocket.  A seemingly nice young man named Jack (Murphy), sitting next to Lisa on the flight, turns out to be the man tasked with ensuring Lisa makes the switch.  How?  By threatening to have an assassin murder her father.  This murder plot has as many moving parts as the JFK assassination, if you believe in such a conspiracy. 

While the plot of Red Eye is silly, the tension is not.  McAdams and Murphy play a cat and mouse game with McAdams having to essentially arrange for the death of one person to spare the life of another.  That's tough on one's conscience, but Lisa is determined to spare both if she can, which would not please Jack, whose last name is revealed to be Rippner.  This was surely done for a laugh, but Jack is menacingly and quietly played by Murphy, which makes him all the more scary.  No one goes over the top, not even when one of the characters is stabbed in the trachea with a pen.  The man would have a right to be livid, but he behaves reasonably under the circumstances. 

Red Eye is directed by Wes Craven, known primarily for the Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream series, but Red Eye is not a slasher film, but it's suspenseful and tautly brought in at just under eighty minutes.  There is little fat on it, and despite all of the extra moves the assassins make, Red Eye is still lean and effectively gets the job done.