| CABIN PRESSURE : Wes Craven's 'Red Eye' [7/10] |
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| Friday, 09 September 2005 | |
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . WARNING: CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS In a summer of near-constant turbulence at the American box-office, hit movies have been - for the studios - a distressingly rare breed. One of the more unexpected, noteworthy and - for the audience - welcome successes has been Red Eye, a mostly-airborne thriller showcasing a pair of rising young-ish stars - Canada's Rachel McAdams and Irishman Cillian Murphy, both 28 - giving veteran Brian Cox a nice, untaxing little payday, and introducing us to a very promising comedienne in newcomer Jayma Mays. These cast details aren't the main reason why the success of Red Eye is so heartening, however. Let's hope the studios take note of its brief 85-minute running time (minus titles and credits, an even briefer 76 mins!) and finally start to realise that bigger, or rather longer, isn't always better. If fact, for many genres - most notably comedy and horror - a lengthy duration is almost always a harbinger of trouble. Red Eye isn't actually a horror film, of course - though you'd be forgiven for expecting one judging by the title, the poster, the ad campaign and the presence of a near-legendary shockmeister in the director's seat. This is, rather, a psychological suspense-drama with action-pic touches (a rocket is launched from a boat into a hotel room during the first of several climaxes), some humour (mostly courtesy of the engagingly ditzy Mays) and a finale featuring a knife-wielding maniac, which is the only time you're really reminded of Craven's previous work. He otherwise does a slightly impersonal but, on balance, admirably straight-arrow job of adapting a niftily high-concept screenplay by debutant scriptwriter Carl Ellsworth - another positive aspect of the Red Eye behind-the-scenes story is that Ellsworth was, despite his relative inexperience, allowed to work on the project without it passing through the hands of any other writer. In an era when so many scripts are uninspired committee-type efforts with botched rewrites galore, DreamWorks Pictures are to be commended for adopting the 'lone wolf' strategy. Ellsworth wasn't a complete novice, of course - he'd previously written episodes of Buffy and Xena, not surprising given the fact that Red Eye also hinges on a very strong female lead. Mean Girls graduate McAdams is outstanding as Lisa Reisert, super-efficient manager of a Miami hotel. She's on her way back from Dallas following the funeral of her grandmother when she makes the acquaintance of the charming Jackson Rippner (Murphy) - the pair share a drink before boarding their overnight 'red eye' flight, then find that they've been placed in adjoining seats. This isn't a coincidence, however: Jackson soon reveals that he's in the employ of nefarious parties aiming to assassinate Keefe (Jack Scalia), a Homeland Security bigwig who's about to check in at Lisa's hotel. These parties need Keefe and his family switched from their usual room to one more conducive to rocket-launcher attack - and only Lisa has the authority to telephone (using the on-board 'air-phone') her desk-minding colleague Cynthia (Mays) and thus facilitate the fatal exchange. If Lisa refuses to cooperate, Jackson's cohorts will kill her Dad (Cox)... Cue tension-filled, against-the-clock suspense as Lisa schemes to frustrate Jackson's devious plans - first in the confines of the plane, and then on the ground in Miami. Telephones are crucial to almost every stage of the plot - Cox (sporting an unfortunate dye-job) almost literally "phones in" his performance - to the extent that Red Eye feels like a variation of two recent thriller based on scripts by Larry Cohen, Joel Schumacher's (overrated) 80-minute Phone Booth and David R Ellis's (underrated) 93-minute Cellular: Ellsworth has himself freely admitted that he came up with his idea after seeing an early draft of Phone Booth. While this does give Red Eye a slightly derivative air - and there's of course no obnoxious passenger anywhere near on a par with Rick Hoffman's outrageously movie-stealing 'Lawyer' from Cellular - Craven (a better director than Ellis and a class above Schumacher) and his cast do sock it all over with sufficient vim and vigour that few audiences will mind very much, even if they have seen both of the 'Cohen' movies. The plot's essential implausibility isn't much of a problem either - another benefit of that breathlessly brisk running-time. It's only afterwards that you realise just how daft much of it has been - but in retrospect you do also appreciate that Red Eye makes a compensatory amount of coherent sense in psychological terms. The real subtext of Ellsworth's script is Lisa's emotional state: her mother is never mentioned; she's just a lost a much-loved relative; despite being head-turningly attracting she has no boyfriend, and we deduce this is because she's still suffering trauma from a violent sexual assault. Jackson is thus a kind of 'demon lover', 'conjured up' from Lisa's subconscious (it's a two-way attraction - Murphy himself has stated that "I want this guy to actually be in love with this woman in a way, even if he doesn't realise it.") Dealing with him is the only way she can obtain catharsis and start moving on - though physically overpowered, she fights back, infantilising him by calling him Jack (a name he hasn't answered to since he was "10 years old"), and then symbolically castrates him by plunging a pen into his throat, thus reducing his suavely insinuating voice to a painfully croaky whisper. Neil Young 11th September, 2005 RED EYE : [7/10] : USA 2005 : Wes CRAVEN : 85 mins seen at Cineworld cinema, Sunderland (UK), 8th September 2005 - public show originally rated 7/10, but downgraded after further reflection, 10th Oct 2005 switched back again, 2nd December. one day i'll make up my mind * This is the shortest of the eighteen films Craven has directed solo (see below) - a minute shorter than the now-forgotten Hills Have Eyes 2 from 20 years ago. Red Eye's financial success is also good news for Craven's many admirers - he certainly didn't waste any time bouncing back from the all-too-aptly-named Cursed which stumbled into cinemas earlier this year. There was a five year gap between Scream 3 and Cursed, but only a five month gap between Cursed's US premiere on 25th February and Red Eye's 4th August release. Wes Craven (b.1939) : films as solo director year age # ---------------------------------------------------- 1972 33 1 Last House on the Left (91mins) 1977 38 2 The Hills Have Eyes (89) 1981 42 3 Deadly Blessing (100) 1982 43 4 Swamp Thing (91) 1984 45 5 A Nightmare on Elm Street (91) 1985 46 6 The Hills Have Eyes 2 (86) 1986 47 7 Deadly Friend (91) 1988 49 8 The Serpent and the Rainbow (98) 1989 50 9 Shocker (109) 1991 52 10 The People Under the Stairs (102) 1994 55 11 Wes Craven's New Nightmare (112) 1995 56 12 Vampire in Brooklyn (100) 1996 57 13 Scream (111) 1997 58 14 Scream 2 (120) 1999 60 15 Music of the Heart (124) 2000 61 16 Scream 3 (116) 2005 66 17 Cursed (97) 66 18 Red Eye (85) Films as co-director 1971 32 1 Together (72) - with Sean Cunningham 1975 36 2 Angela, the Fireworks Woman (78) - uncredited, with "Abe Snake" The idea came about after a good friend of mine gave me a very early script of the movie Phone Booth. And at the time, I was really surprised at how a movie like that affected me. I'm a child of Star Wars and Die Hard, and I'm just as much a fan as anyone else of the summer blockbuster. But that was such a breath of fresh air. And so after that, I was like, "That would be really cool to write something like that, or to maybe even take that to another level." Really, Red-Eye was largely experimental. In Phone Booth, you have a person trapped in a phone booth, and you have a sniper somewhere up in a building. But there's a lot of space between them where lots of things can happen to keep our interest. And so I really asked myself, "Can you literally shrink that down even more? Is it possible to have a movie where your villain is literally sitting next to your hero for a certain amount of time?" And the action, if you will, and the intrigue comes out of the dialogue. And that was the basic premise. Carl Ellsworth I [wanted] to do something that acknowledges 9/11 and the way our lives have changed since then, and the fact that we're fighting an enemy, whatever your political or religious beliefs are, that is causing us to get into a fight where it's impossible not to hurt innocents, and it's impossible not to lose your innocence. That was one segment, and the other was, I wanted the third act to hinge on the fact that by [Rippner] being unprofessional and having his masculinity threatened, he makes a big blunder by following [Lisa] to her house rather than disappearing in the crowd as he should have as a professional. Wes Craven |
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