Red Eye

This was one of the ones that snuck by me completely undetected.  It wasn’t until I heard someone talking about Wes Craven’s body of work that I had even heard about this movie.  In fact, after I heard the name, I still thought this was the one with Jodie Foster and her missing child in it (Flightplan).  So when I got it from Netflix I was disappointed to see it was something completely different.  Although not as disappointed as I was when Inglorious Bastards arrived this week and it was the 1978 action flick…

Since this wasn’t the movie I thought it was, I decided to watch this thing and get it over with so I can get it back in the mail.  I was pleasantly surprised.  This was an alright movie.  I know “alright” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement but compared to what I expected it to be, that really isn’t that bad.

Woman is catching a flight home, meets a friendly man.  Once they are seated next to each other and airborne, friendly man reveals himself to be the bad guy.  After convincing her that he knows everything about her life, bad guy gives her an ultimatum; help me in my bad plans or I let my associates kill your family.  She spends the rest of the flight trying to escape and avoid making the call.  After the flight lands she tries to expose the bad guy.

You know, writing spoiler-free plot reviews kind of sucks.  That seems so damn dry to me after reading it back.  BUT, this movie is only a couple years old so I really couldn’t allow myself to open it all up.

I really wasn’t expecting much from this flick.  It had a couple no-name actors in it.  The bad guy (Cillian Murphy) is just creepy.  That’s one of the things that really doesn’t work right from the beginning of the movie.  He’s one of those guys that when you look at him you point at the screen and go, “THAT’S the bad guy!”  He’s a decent enough actor but he’ll always be the bad guy.  You never get the “surprise” reveal that he’s not the innocent stranger.  The second the camera was on him just quietly standing in line, you knew he was up to no good.

The woman is Rachel McAdams and even though she’s an unknown (to me), she comes across pretty good.  That is one of the things that does work in the movie.  I really like the empowered strong woman as the lead.  She’s not the strong woman type like a Linda Hamilton in Terminator or a Sigourney Weaver in Alien, she’s an ordinary woman who gets put in a shitty situation and finds the strength to fight back and get through it.  Some of her moments don’t work for me, the acting seemed a little forced and cheesy, but overall the “normal” woman not allowing the situation to drive her made me really happy.

Enough about the actors, the real problems were in the plot (and here come the real spoilers so if you don’t wanna know, ya gotta go.…)

Okay, it’s a horror/thriller, I know you have to overlook reality a little bit but you can’t in this movie.  The entire premise is built upon the idea that this could happen to any of us.  The protagonist has a pretty basic job.  She’s a hotel manager so she’s not expecting to be put into any real danger.  If you’re an executive or a senator or something, you consider the danger of blackmail or coercion.  When you have a mundane job like all the rest of us you don’t give it much thought.  She is as plain as any of us and that is how we are expected to relate to her.  If we are expected to see this movie as taking place in the real world, then it should live up to real word standards.

All she has to do is call her hotel and change the room assignment for the government official (head of Department of Homeland Security) who will be arriving today.  This will make an assassination attempt possible.  Bad guy has a man parked in front of her father’s house waiting on word to from him to kill the father or leave, depending on the outcome of the assassination attempt.

There were several ways out of this situation that never came up.  I know that under extreme duress a lot of your thinking goes out the window but she had plenty of time to sit quietly and think.  She sat there for half the movie contemplating what to do and tried several plans to escape or avoid the situation.  Why did she never think to just stand up and scream what was going on?  Or yell, “He’s got a gun (or bomb)!”?  They’d restrain the guy and she could call 911.  The Senator would be safe, daddy would be safe and they’d have two bad guys in custody.  Even if she was worried that the bad guy had the killer on speed dial, there was an entire scene where the phones were out of order due to the storm.  She could have caused her scene then knowing they were out of communication range and that the killer wasn’t on a “if you don’t hear from me every ten minutes go ahead and kill the father” type of plan…

Instead she tries to escape.   Where are you going to go on a plane?  No need to try and be secretive, just stand up and shout!

But she ends up making the call.  Some people could argue that the bad guy’s plan was flawed because she might be the type of person that makes the decision not to call.  I’d say if she had kids and you were going to kill one of them your plan is a bit stronger.  But anyway, she makes the call.  As they land, she stabs the guy in the throat with a pen and runs off the plane.  They show her getting at least a ten minute head start (he is in the bathroom and consulting with a doctor on the plane about the pen, and then he’s got to get through all the rest of the people leaving the plane) but somehow he’s right on her tail.  She could have made her phone calls and had everything all wrapped up the second he walked out of the gate.  But she runs through the airport and narrowly escapes the bad guy, stealing a car to drive off and save the day.

Now right then, the bad guy should have made the call and ordered daddy’s execution.  Instead, he races her to daddy’s house.  WTF!?  She calls the hotel and in a moment of cool reality, thinks to tell the girl to pull the fire alarm and go upstairs to warn security of the impending assassination. The fire alarm was a good idea.  Except when she goes upstairs to warn them she uses the elevator.  The elevators don’t work once the fire alarm is pulled.  No they don’t.  A fancy hotel like this one would be shut down if it weren’t within code.  The only way to get the elevators to work would be with a fireman’s key.  It’s the little things like that that ruin the reality of movies for me.  I was willing to overlook the fact that wherever they filmed half of the landing/airport chase scenes, it was NOT at Miami International.  Some airport shots were in MIA, some were not.  The terrazzo floor was all wrong and MIA doesn’t have a concourse “M”.  Why mix it up?  Spending six months exploring every inch of a building will ruin things like this for you.  But, not important…

So they warn security and the senator gets his family out in time, just as a missile is launched into the room.  Rocket, missile, RPG…  whatever it was.  Someone in a boat half a mile away put a tube on his shoulder and fired something that made the top half of the hotel go boom.  And in the destruction, the senator’s family and security scuttle toward the elevator and the hotel clerk just stands there looking at the destruction.  Another WTF?!  How does she know there isn’t another missile coming?  Why isn’t security concerned about this girl who obviously knows something they don’t?  Get down girl!

With the hotel disaster finished, we get to daddy’s house.  She pulls up and sees the empty car of the killer.  She looks toward the front door and in another moment of good decision like pulling the fire alarm, hits the gas and runs into the front of the house killing the bad guy!  I loved it.  That was another moment of, “I know what I’d do but they never do it in movi… OH COOL SHE DID IT!”  Daddy is alive and has called 911.  But the bad guy has driven to the house, knocks daddy out and tries to kill the girl.  There is the standard hide/seek horror movie sequence.  She grabs a bat and fights the bad guy.  She is thrown over the stairs and lands at the front door where she sees the gun of the guy she ran over.  She levels the gun at the advancing bad guy and… pauses.  Oh man, she was doing so well up to that point.  Teresa and Becca have both been trained in handgun usage and the first rule is, if you have to pull a gun on someone, you’re doing it to shoot them not to scare them.  Empty the fucking magazine into him!  Pull that trigger until it clicks empty.  Bad guy lunges forward, she gets one shot off before he’s on top of her and just as he’s going to kill her, daddy steps in from off screen and shoots the bad guy.  Too bad.  She came across as such a strong female lead yet she falls for the same old gun swatting trick in the end and needs a man to rescue her…

Now, I understand why the bad guy’s gun had a silencer on it.  But why did the father’s gun look identical?  Why would the father have a silencer on his gun?  At that moment I thought of how awesome it would have been if he looked down at his daughter and said, “It would have been so much easier if you had just played along kiddo” and then pulled the trigger killing her.  Wow, that might have been an ending to talk about.  But no, we end the movie on a series of WTF? moments.

First, how the hell does she get out of the house?  As the father kills the bad guy, the police are pulling up outside.  There is a SUV through the front door and two dead guys in the living room.  She just ran away from an airport after stabbing a guy in the neck and then stealing a car.  How does she just walk away and end up back at the hotel?

Second, how the hell is she not in Guantanamo Bay?  The head of Homeland Security was just shot at with a missile launcher and somehow she just waltzes into the hotel and resumes duty as though nothing had happened?  No one questions her as to why she ordered the room switch at the last minute?  No one questions her as to why she knew about the assassination attempt?  No.  All we get is the Homeland Security guy walks over and says something like, “We should do lunch sometime” as he and his security cadre leave the building.  I don’t fucking think so!

Last, did she really need to tell off the annoying guests at the end?  There is a couple who check into the hotel in the beginning of the movie.  They are annoying and pushy, frazzling the clerk behind the desk.  Because they are regulars, they get pacified.  Now, there is an entire floor missing off of the hotel and the lobby is crawling with police and government officials.  Am I supposed to believe that they really want to “complain” about the noise and a few plaster chips?  Come on, that’s just too much.  But she handles it with quiet professionalism and when they insist on firing the clerk she tells them off.  Really?  After the day you’ve had you just couldn’t deal with this tiny little problem?  You felt that of all the assholes you dealt with today, there are the two that you’ll tell off?  Lame.

I know it sounds like I’m ripping this movie up but I honestly liked it.  Not one of the greatest movies ever and it had it’s flaws but I like it.  For all the plot holes and issues, the aspect that kept me in the movie was the strength of the lead character.  She played it like she was John McClain but we never lost sight of the fact that she was an ordinary person who cried when she was hurt and cried when she was scared.  For the first time in a while I saw someone in a movie pull a few stunts I thought I would do if I were in that situation, another plus.  But the ending falls apart when you apply “real-worldism” to it.  In the real world, bad guy makes the call and disappears.  She pulls up to the house and finds daddy dead and the police lock her up for the airport stabbing and car theft.  While in jail the FBI come to ask her about the hotel assassination attempt.  Of course there is no evidence of the conspirators so it looks like she’s making the whole thing up.  Not such a happy ending in the real world.

7 of 11 Skulls