3 out of 5

Directed by: Wes Craven

Watching this about twenty years after the fact, it’s pretty delightfully goofy. The period pre-streaming was still producing low-rent thrillers for the big screen, and we swallowed a lot of suspend-all-disbelief plots for the sake of an entertaining flick. While that’s not untrue in the post-streaming era either, there are a lot more attempts at expositing us towards that disbelief (or hyper editing around it) in order to counter a very skeptical and distracted audience. But: my pre-streaming self sends forward vague memories of knowing this was goofy at the time, but feeling mostly pleased by it, mightily thanks to it being helmed by a director willing to embrace that campier side of the thriller genre: Wes Craven. Mixing that with some committed performances from its leads – those commitments also leaning into camp, or tropes – and taking note of the film’s sleek sub-90 minute runtime, and you’ve got a recipe for a pleasingly dumb way to pass the time.

Of course, I must stress how much disbelief is required here, as the film is so zeroed in on its main actors and the A-plotline – the only plotline – that if you check out early on, nothing is going to bring you back in. So if you’re already rolling your eyes at harried hotel manager Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) and mysterious stranger Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy) have a moderately creepy meet-cute at the Dallas airport while waiting for their delayed flight, you certainly won’t buy in to the confined theatrics once they’re on the plane and that creepy undertone goes Freddy Krueger cornball, for very tenuous reasons that, again, didn’t even make much sense back in breezy ol’ 2005.

But there are so many wonderfully cliched side characters stuffed into this, shuffling around the tete-a-tete between Lisa and Jackson, and slicky streamlined direction from Craven, with sharp DP work from Robert Yeoman, buoyantly over-the-top stings from Marco Beltrami, that if you are going with it, the moments where it chooses to punch with a plot point (or actual punch) are solid.

As is true of a lot of 90s / early 00s stuff in this vibe, you can see this as an acceptable episode of some procedural you’re watching, but it feels pretty overblown at full length. Craven finds a lot of space in Carl Ellsworth’s empty-headed screenplay to inject horror movie energy, but also plays the first part relatively “straight,” with the movie operating in kinda-sorta real time, from boarding, to the flight, to deplaning, which additionally helps lend urgency to that empty-headedness.

Again, though, your mileage – no pun intended – will vary, as my fellow filmgoer felt put off by the whole affair. However, I think if you set your expectations to Camp, Red Eye does the job, and with a talented crew and cast that make sure it’s done more professionally than a lot of its peers.