RED EYE

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Red Eye, Black Eye

“Red Eye” screenwriter Carl Ellsworth’s admission that he wrote the movie with inspiration from Joel Schumacher’s notoriously hokey “Phone Booth” (2003) speaks volumes about the tedious straight-line narrative the author gives horror master Wes Craven to direct.

Craven fails to elevate the lackluster script. The filmmaker does surprisingly little to add scares where the suspense lags for several sequences at a time.

Up-and-coming actor Cillian Murphy falls flat in his successive second-rate outing after a lightweight performance in “Batman Begins.”

If you’ve seen its theatrical trailer then you’ve seen “Red Eye.” Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) is an annoying “total-quality-management” type of luxury hotel manager on an overnight flight from Dallas to Miami. Lisa’s fear of flying is overshadowed by the immediate threat to her father’s (Brian Cox) life as posed by her crafty seatmate Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy).

Jackson goes to great pains to keep in touch with an associate who is on the ground staking out Lisa’s dad as a hostage-in-waiting to force Lisa to call her hotel and have them switch a room reserved for Charles Keefe (Jack Scalia), the “Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security.”

The audience is supposed to buy that these are professional killers who want to bump off a key politician by kidnapping the relative of a hotel exec in order to switch their target’s heavily guarded room so they can fire a missile from their patrolling fishing boat.

Whew! That’s what I call “overwrought.” The skewed logic of this crucial narrative conceit gets stretched so thin that the film’s explosive climax raises audience guffaws rather than cheers.

The utter silliness of Murphy’s character marks him as more clown than villain. The potential joy of seeing his character overpowered is diminished by his brain-challenged condition that generates pearls of bum dialogue in nearly every scene. Subplots involving Lisa’s uncharacterized father, and a blank Miami-visiting politician, are neglected such that they’re barely sustained as even simple plot devices.

The ordinarily reliable Brian Cox is reduced to literally phoning in his performance (he’s on the phone for half of the movie). However, Rachel McAdams takes the brunt of the shame for characterizing a greasy people-pleasing hotel manager. As one of the most loathed archetypes of the business world, managers occupy a dusty home among character types that are generally prohibited from occupying the elite title of protagonist.

While the audience is left to ponder a world with one less manager in it, the movie flaunts its embarrassing ruse of attempting to generate suspense on- board an airplane without ever committing to the freak-out experience it implies. The in-air travel time that we expect to be filled with nervy tension is nothing more than a series of small-time one-upsmanship tests between a couple of people who are more fit to play checkers than chess.

“Red Eye” is a huge disappointment because Wes Craven is a highly skilled director who took a paycheck to make a bland Hollywood movie. We’ve come to expect a lion’s share of Boo!-surprises from the director of the “Scream” franchise, but Wes Craven seems to be either too lazy or just not interested in producing shocker scenes for this film. If you’re a fan of Wes Craven, don’t see “Red Eye.”

Rated PG-13. 85 mins.