Red Eye (2005): This thriller couldn't get off the ground

Red Eye, 2005, directed by Wes Craven, streamed on Paramount+, 2.5 stars.

Wes Craven took a break from his normal fare of slasher humor to turn out this psycho-thriller set on an airplane.

The setup is a bit convoluted. An assassin-for-hire needs a hotel manager to assign a Homeland Security official to a specific room so his murder team can target the victim from an external vantage point. Assassin-for-hire corners hotel manager onboard an airplane to force her to call her hotel to arrange the room assignment.

Now, in order for this to work, a series of coincidences and accidents need to be arranged to happen precisely as planned in the first 15 minutes of the movie.

I was calling bullshit on this setup almost from the beginning, and what turned into a tension-filled airplane ride could not get me all that interested.

In short, I couldn't buy the premise and the movie couldn't capture me. We did get a couple of pretty good action scenes in the predictable third act. Craven's direction was skillful, and Rachel McAdams was pretty good as the victim.

But I did not like the contrivances of the script, and I was not too fond of Cillian Murphy as the main antagonist. So Red Eye just never got airborne for me.        

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