Wes Craven's Red Eye

I saw the new Wes Craven thriller “Red Eye” yesterday and Rachel McAdams, the young actress is certainly impressive. I looked up McAdams filmography on imdb.com and apparently, she has had some high-banner movies under her belt including a turn in Mean Girls (which I loved - the movie, not her turn, which was good, not great!) and The Notebook (the trailer was so horrendous that I never quite ventured anywhere near it). I can see why Craven chose McAdams for the role – the girl has a toughness about her, a way of looking directly, arrestingly, at the camera. She’s more than a match for Cillian Murphy, who after Batman Begins, gets to do another creepy role (He is “Jack Rippner” who does “oh, government overthrows, high-profile assassinations, the usual stuff” for a living). And really Murphy is far too creepy for my taste – with those pink lips and blue blue eyes. And this is the actor who first broke into the big scene as an old-fashioned protagonist in Danny Boyle’s 28 days later! Murphy and McAdams are going to go far, methinks.

And the movie? It’s a very well-crafted thriller. Craven can’t quite sustain the tension during the air-plane ride. Instead he looks at the actors in hard close-ups and lets them do their bit. The claustrophobic environs of an airplane are well-captured and I particularly liked the bit inside the restroom. The movie ends with a flourish however, in the kind of scenario that Craven knows inside-out – a slasher with a knife chasing a young nubile girl in a deserted house. Despite seeing the scenario hundreds of times, it’s still astonishing how it still manages to wring you out, when done well.