by Rob Dunne

Wes Craven is a very accomplished movie maker. He has written and directed some horror classics - A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Hills Have Eyes and the quite disturbing The Last House on the Left - and reinvented the genre brilliantly with his post-modern Scream trilogy.

His latest effort, Red Eye, is just a mediocre film. It starts out with an engaging premise - Lisa is a hotel guest coordinator who is targeted by an assassination coordinator (for want of a better term) in order to engineer a hotel room change for the Deputy Secretary for Homeland Security to better facilitate his demise. The bad guy's name is Jack Rippner (and the obvious joke is referenced in the film). Lisa must make a phone call to the hotel and arrange for the room change or else Jack will call another bad guy who will kill Lisa's father.

[STORY SPOILERS IN BELOW PARAGRAPH ONLY]
All of this drama takes place on an airplane (yes, you guessed it, a red-eye flight). The plane is equipped with those air-fones so it's an acceptably plausible scenario to generate some suspense at the outset. What follows is a series of foiled attempts by Lisa to out-wit the villain. Eventually, having exhausted all avenues to thwart Jack's plan, Lisa complies and makes the call.

The film starts out as what could be an excellent thriller - political intrigue, assassination plots and airline terror. However, there is a sudden shift of gears and the film basically turns into an encore installment of Scream. Jack Rippner is shrewd and menacing for half the film but degenerates into a bumbling idiot after that. Red Eye becomes Scream without the cool scary mask.

Where Scream maintained a self-referential sense of humor throughout, Red Eye becomes confused. It's like Wes Craven almost made a real thriller but reverted to the Scream formula just in case. Cillian Murphy's cool demeanor and ice blue eyes are perfect for the role of Jack Rippner at the beginning. But when Wes Craven turns him into an evil Mr. Bean, the film just becomes stupid. And unlike Scream, where the audience was in on the clever joke, Red Eye just inadvertently becomes a lame joke.

For trivia fans, you may notice that Wes Craven plays one of the passengers on the flight. There is also a weird continuity glitch with Lisa's necklace (just keep watching).