Red Eye (2005)

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, All Movie Guide