RED EYE - wes craven - 6.9 / 10

Better than it has any right to be, Wes Craven's Red Eye still peters out long before its conclusion. But the things that work about it work very well. For instance, the heroine (played by Rachel McAdams) has previously been assaulted and raped. And that previous attack causes her to fight viciously against ever being made a victim again. Thus her attempts to defy the villainous Jack (Cillian Murphy) play not as unbelievable, only-in-the-movies developments but as vital to her character's mental survival. She can't allow herself to be a victim again and thus must resist at every turn. Her actions are entirely believable and motivated. And that makes her one of the strongest women characters in recent film history.

Her character's history of being raped also functions as a metaphor for our collective wounding by the attack on the World Trade Center. With most of the film set on an airplane and involving a plot to kill the Director of Homeland Security, Wes Craven is certainly gunning for our post-9/11 anxieties. The first act of the film plays as a romantic comedy, never hinting that something sinister and dangerous is lurking around the corner. Although that surprise is ruined by the film's trailer and advertising campaign, the idea is that America, pre-9/11, lived the same sort of charmed existence, never thinking anything bad could happen. And when the shit hit the fan on September 11, as in this film, we Americans had a hard time believing that it was really happening. But slowly our resolve hardened just as McAdams's character's does in this film. She and we attack blindly when reflection is probably the safer and more levelheaded course of action. Furthering the 9/11 metaphor, when the terrorists of the film finally mount their attack against the Homeland Security director, the effect of their strike looks eerily similar to the damage inflicted by the planes on the World Trade Center.

So yeah, there's a lot of heady stuff going on underneath the surface of this film. The problem is that most of the stuff happening on the surface isn't that interesting. It's the kind of film I could talk myself into liking but won't really have any interest in ever seeing again. Mostly that's because by the last twenty minutes the film has turned into the standard crazed-killer-with-a-knife-stalking-the-heroine thing. It's just not that interesting at this point because the outcome of this sort of thing is never in doubt in mainstream American pictures.