Watching Red Eye is like being in some kind of time warp. As if to emphasise the  chronographic dislocation of late night flights, director Wes Craven has doused his production in a 1970’s sensibility – from the post jet-set interiors to beige costume design, little is as it should be for a post-millennium story. The only things missing from this deconstruction are flares and a handle-bar moustache. Yet it’s a curiously effective touch that lends an otherwise routine thriller a real sense of engagement: like watching a repeat of Charlie’s Angels, only better.
On board an overnight flight to Miami, Lisa finds herself next to the passenger from hell. The chair-creep of Jackson Rippner is not a conventional kind of unwelcome chumminess – his warm ways turn ice cold when he advises Lisa, a hotel manager, that she must move a guest or her father will die. The guest is a senior politician and Jackson has some unpleasant friends. Thus begins a nasty game of cat and mouse that makes short work of a long journey. Red Eye has just the right number of chilling moments amid low-level action, but it never shakes the feeling of exercise. It is the film’s Achilles for in so cleverly mimicking that which was, the production doesn’t get a necessary tail-wind of originality. Red Eye flies, but never really soars.
Craven is no stranger to reinvigorating genres. Scream was horror reborn and while Red Eye doesn’t achieve that level of greatness, it’s still a fun reminder of how thrilling a carefully constructed thriller can be.
// COLIN FRASER