Red Eye

RED EYE

“The interesting thing about Red Eye is it's not just a thriller. It is almost like a little art film,” opines director Wes Craven in a featurette titled A New Kind of Thriller that's available as a DVD bonus feature. “The entire second act is... basically two people on an airplane just talking... [screenwriter] Carl [Ellsworth] made it work with the dialogue.”

Indeed, this motion picture from 2005 (which was the first feature film credit for Ellsworth, who had previously written for television shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer) demonstrates that tension and clever banter can elevate a low-budget film to a quality worthy of acclaim. Critics sang the praises of the project during its theatrical run. In The New Yorker, David Denby called Red Eye “a dandy little thriller” that is “made with classical technique and bravura skill.” Ethan Alter (in Film Journal International) wrote that the movie “has a playful wit and enough genuine tension to make it worth your time and money.” Empire Magazine concludes that the film is “slick fun deftly handled by Craven.”

The director (in a video interview on the DVD's bonus features) describes how he became attached to the project. “Somebody called up and said, 'We have this script – first-time writer, but it's really good. Check it out,' and I was actually at the end of working a very long time on Cursed, the movie I did before Red Eye, and I was pretty much exhausted and burnt out, so, you know, 'I want to go to an island someplace and disappear for a year, but okay, I'll read it.' And it was just like, 'Oh, oh, oh, oh, juicy stuff.' And then it was like, 'Well, God I have to do this. I'd be a fool not to.'”

The bare-bones plot follows a hotel manager named Lisa who has booked a flight from Texas (where she attended her grandmother's funeral) back to Florida. At the airport, she meets a charming fellow who buys her a drink and chats her up. On the plane, Lisa finds herself sitting next to him and learns that his name is Jackson Rippner. Twenty minutes into the film (which runs a mere seventy-six minutes total before the end credits roll), the plane takes off. Just a few minutes into the second act, Rippner reveals his sinister side as his dialogue with Lisa skews darker and darker. Turns out he's part of a team hell-bent on assassinating a Homeland Security bigwig who is hours away from checking in at the hotel Lisa runs, and Rippner needs Lisa to phone her staff and move the target to a particular room so that Rippner's allies will have a clear shot at the suite with a surface-to-air missile. If Lisa does not cooperate, another one of Rippner's pals will murder Lisa's father.

I won't spoil much of the story except to say that in the third act, Rippner shows up at the home of Lisa's father, and a taut cat-and-mouse chase ensues. On the home video commentary track, Craven observes that in this sequence Rippner “was fighting her on her home territory for the first time. Suddenly he's on the other person's turf. Originally it was written for the father's house that he had moved into after a divorce that she had not grown up in, and we made it the house where she had grown up as a child, and so she knew every inch of it.”

My only complaint about Red Eye is that Lisa's dad ultimately shoots and kills Rippner about three minutes before the credits roll. I'd rather see the protagonist save herself at the climactic moment. This is a minor quibble, though, and Red Eye is otherwise an expertly-crafted yarn. Seek it out.