Post by courtnee on Aug 18, 2005 14:00:29 GMT -5
Review: It's very good with no spoilers!
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This couple flies the frantic skies on 'Red Eye'
BY JAN STUART
STAFF WRITER
August 19, 2005
RED EYE (PG-13). Director Wes Craven goes up, up and away on a cross-country flight with the deceptively baby-faced Cillian Murphy and the not-so-helpless single gal (Rachel McAdams) he corners on board. Giddily entertaining: the kind of suspense that rouses the audience to a collective grin. Jayma Mays is winning as McAdams' put-upon underling. 1:25 (intense sequences of violence, language).
The summer of 2005 has been exceptionally generous to Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy. She shined as the bride's sister in the season's smash comedy, "Wedding Crashers," and he scored as the deceptive Dr. Jonathan Crane in the season's comic-book blockbuster, "Batman Begins." As a bonus, they now get to go at each other tooth and nail - could we change that to tooth and pen? - in what ought to emerge as the summer's killer thriller.
The referee behind the duo's battle royal is director Wes Craven, who has gathered the know-how gleaned from a career of spook-house chills and rolled it up into an air-tight ball of fun called "Red Eye." Neither a horror flick in the full-on manner of his "Nightmare on Elm Street" nor a parody along the lines of "Scream," it traffics in a hybridized form of suspense that plugs into the jack-in-the-box jolts of the former and the self-aware humor of the latter.
As might be inferred from its title, much of "Red Eye" takes place in the air. Catching a storm-tossed flight from Los Angeles to Miami, take-charge hotel manager Lisa Reisert (McAdams) has the good fortune, or so she initially thinks, to land a seat next to a seductive stranger with the absurdly foreboding name Jackson Rippner (Murphy).
As it happens, the adjoining seats provide their third close encounter of the evening, the two having already run into one another earlier in the ticket line and again at an airport bar. But Lisa welcomes the coincidence: Jack talks a very good talk, and he has the sort of penetrating Mediterranean-blue eyes that could disarm the most resolute of skyjackers.
What a drag, then, to discover that her in-flight neighbor harbors nefarious intentions toward one of her most prominent hotel clients, and that he has elaborately contrived to enlist Lisa's aid, using her beloved dad as a bargaining chip.
Preposterous, to be sure. And the credibility gap only widens as Jack's lethal mission nears its consummation. But by that point, Craven already has us in the palm of his hand, smooth-talking us with a finesse worthy of his dashing villain.
Craven profits from a sly script that launches the film like "Airplane!" revisited: Screenwriter Carl Ellsworth lays out the passengers in caricature strokes (the complainer, the chatty matron, the precocious child) that fiddle with our expectations of the role each will play, quite unwittingly, in Lisa's airborne crisis.
Well before "Red Eye" reaches its knock-down, drag-out destination, the director's Hitchc*ckian manipulations work the audience into a state somewhere to the right of bliss and the left of euphoria. You may shout yourself silly cheering on McAdams and jeering the gloweringly diabolical Murphy, who, if he ever did, will never eat lunch in a romantic comedy again.
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www.newsday.com/entertainment/movies/ny-etsecw4388043aug19,0,936125.story?coll=nyc-movies-now-playing
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This couple flies the frantic skies on 'Red Eye'
BY JAN STUART
STAFF WRITER
August 19, 2005
RED EYE (PG-13). Director Wes Craven goes up, up and away on a cross-country flight with the deceptively baby-faced Cillian Murphy and the not-so-helpless single gal (Rachel McAdams) he corners on board. Giddily entertaining: the kind of suspense that rouses the audience to a collective grin. Jayma Mays is winning as McAdams' put-upon underling. 1:25 (intense sequences of violence, language).
The summer of 2005 has been exceptionally generous to Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy. She shined as the bride's sister in the season's smash comedy, "Wedding Crashers," and he scored as the deceptive Dr. Jonathan Crane in the season's comic-book blockbuster, "Batman Begins." As a bonus, they now get to go at each other tooth and nail - could we change that to tooth and pen? - in what ought to emerge as the summer's killer thriller.
The referee behind the duo's battle royal is director Wes Craven, who has gathered the know-how gleaned from a career of spook-house chills and rolled it up into an air-tight ball of fun called "Red Eye." Neither a horror flick in the full-on manner of his "Nightmare on Elm Street" nor a parody along the lines of "Scream," it traffics in a hybridized form of suspense that plugs into the jack-in-the-box jolts of the former and the self-aware humor of the latter.
As might be inferred from its title, much of "Red Eye" takes place in the air. Catching a storm-tossed flight from Los Angeles to Miami, take-charge hotel manager Lisa Reisert (McAdams) has the good fortune, or so she initially thinks, to land a seat next to a seductive stranger with the absurdly foreboding name Jackson Rippner (Murphy).
As it happens, the adjoining seats provide their third close encounter of the evening, the two having already run into one another earlier in the ticket line and again at an airport bar. But Lisa welcomes the coincidence: Jack talks a very good talk, and he has the sort of penetrating Mediterranean-blue eyes that could disarm the most resolute of skyjackers.
What a drag, then, to discover that her in-flight neighbor harbors nefarious intentions toward one of her most prominent hotel clients, and that he has elaborately contrived to enlist Lisa's aid, using her beloved dad as a bargaining chip.
Preposterous, to be sure. And the credibility gap only widens as Jack's lethal mission nears its consummation. But by that point, Craven already has us in the palm of his hand, smooth-talking us with a finesse worthy of his dashing villain.
Craven profits from a sly script that launches the film like "Airplane!" revisited: Screenwriter Carl Ellsworth lays out the passengers in caricature strokes (the complainer, the chatty matron, the precocious child) that fiddle with our expectations of the role each will play, quite unwittingly, in Lisa's airborne crisis.
Well before "Red Eye" reaches its knock-down, drag-out destination, the director's Hitchc*ckian manipulations work the audience into a state somewhere to the right of bliss and the left of euphoria. You may shout yourself silly cheering on McAdams and jeering the gloweringly diabolical Murphy, who, if he ever did, will never eat lunch in a romantic comedy again.
------------
www.newsday.com/entertainment/movies/ny-etsecw4388043aug19,0,936125.story?coll=nyc-movies-now-playing
