8/21/06: Red Eye (2005)We’ll have plenty of retro fun with next week’s Back-To-School Film Festival, and the rest of this week will safely avoid the current decade. Today, though, we’ll indulge our hatred for
World Trade Center one more time. Let’s honor a pretty good post-9/11 movie that includes our very favorite post-9/11 moment. On a plane, yet.
Red Eye is kind of a trifle, but it seemed like a proper masterpiece in the wake of the Leftist crap that was
Flightplan. Most people probably know it as just another thriller that they’ve seen in bits and pieces on their cable channels.
So nobody’ll mind if we sum up
Red Eye in its true spirit as a short modern fable:
There’s a sweet young girl named Lisa who’s on an airplane flight from Dallas to Miami. She’s seated next to a charming stranger named Jackson—who eventually reveals that he’s a professional assassin.
Over the course of the flight, the Director of Homeland Security will be checking into the hotel where Lisa works. She is to use her position to make a phone call that will put the Director into a specific hotel room. That’ll make it easier to kill the guy. If Lisa doesn’t comply, then her father will be killed by Jackson’s associates.
Lisa makes the call, and spends the rest of the movie trying to alert people to Jackson’s evil scheme. Nothing works. The plane lands, and the Director of Homeland Security doesn’t have much longer to live. Lisa talks to Jackson while the plane is pulling up to the gate, telling him about how she was brutally attacked by a sadistic assailant two years before. We might be paraphrasing here.
“Ever since,” says Lisa, “I’ve been telling myself one thing.”
“That it was beyond your control?”
“No. That it’d never happen again.”
And then she stabs Jackson in the throat with a pen.
The movie goes on for a while, but there’s no topping that scene. Lisa’s defiance certainly resonates more than any dialogue about motherf*cking snakes.
You might still watch the movie to appreciate Jackson’s sheer smugness. He’s all about reassuring Lisa to give up her emotional ways and to accept that she has no power. That’s the attitude any assassin would want from an airline passenger. It’s reassuring when
some folks don’t go along.
Make it your own: You can get
Red Eye pretty cheap on DVD, and the director’s commentary may not even directly contradict us. After all, Wes Craven made the original
The Hills Have Eyes.
