Red Eye (2005)

A horror movie so unintentionally funny, it’s scary!

“DeROK Takes The Red Eye”

To take a line from one of the TOP 5 Movies of all time – “Just when I thought you couldn’t get any dumber, you go and do something like this… and totally redeem yourself!”

That basically sums up my experience with Rachel McAdams‘ latest flim, Red Eye.  As you can tell from the poster shot above, Red Eye sells itself as horror film cruising along at 36,000 feet.  In reality, fear never takes flight, seeing as the plot has been grounded do to inclement writing.  (Sorry about the bad puns.  I had a bunch of funny ones run through my mind, but jokes about plane crashes tend to be in poor taste.)

Rachel McAdams

Rachel McAdams

The star of our film is the up and coming Rachel McAdams, playing what is by far her worst role ever.  On a side note, Rachel has to be one of the most unique actresses around.  One minute she’s playing a sixteen year old on The Hot Chick or Mean Girls, the next, she’s playing a twenty-six year old.  What other person in Hollywood manages to pull off playing characters who are born decades apart without any major make-up jobs?  But anyway, Rachel McAdams basically saves the first forty minutes or so.  Because her good looks were the only thing keeping me from jabbing my eyes with a pen.

cillian murphy

Cillian Murphy

Of course this guy completely cancels out any of Rachel McAdam’s beauty.  Cillian Murphy has to be one of the most hideous people I’ve ever seen.  Which you think would be perfect for the villian in a horror flick, right?  Except in Red Eye, Cillian is supposed to be this attractive dude that wins over McAdams’ trust before turning on her.  If I were a single woman in the airport and got approached by someone who looks like Cillian Murphy, I’d be phoning homeland security, not meeting up for a drink.  Speaking of homeland security, Murphy’s goal in all of this is to get the director assassinated.  Rachel McAdams works at the hotel the director is staying at, and he uses her father’s life to threaten her into changing his room.

brian cox

Brian Cox plays Rachel McAdams’ dad.  No, not the NFL player, the actor pictured above.  So the big drama throughout is that if Rachel  doesn’t cooperate, her father dies.  Here’s the problem:  This is the first time I’ve ever seen Brian Cox in a movie where he wasn’t a scumbag villain.  Troy, X2: X-Men United, Bourne Supremacy, the list goes on… He’s always a bad guy.  We’ve been systematically programmed to hate this man.  And now we’re supposed to care if he gets killed?  Sorry, I’m not buying into it.

So the movie drags on for a while.  I’m dying there in the theatre.  But then, just like Lloyd Christmas, Red Eye totally redeemed itself.  In the midst of utter boredom, this guy pops up on the screen, playing the head security guard for the director of homeland security…

colby donaldson

Add on 39 days of facial hair, a cowboy hat, and some swim trunks, and you’ve got yourself Survivor‘s Colby Donaldson.  An absolutely amazing cameo appearance!  There’s comedy, there’s high comedy, and there’s Colby Donaldson playing a security guard in one of the most rigid on-screen performances in history.  There’s nothing like an ex-reality show star trying to stretch out his fifteen minutes by barking commands like “Bring them down!” and “We’ve got a code-red!”.  As a horror film, Red Eye completely missed the boat.  As a comedy, it has some serious potential.  The unintentional comedy is just through the roof on this one.

So the plane lands, and Rachel McAdams makes her escape by stabbing Cillian Murphy in the throat with a Frankenstein pen.  Now here’s the beautiful thing about it all.  For some reason, people were into this movie and started clapping and cheering once this happened.  It cracked me up.  So for the rest of the movie every time Rachel McAdams started beating the snot out of Cillian Murphy, I proceeded to start clapping and got most of the theatre going along with me.  And Cillian Murphy got the snot kicked out of him, quite often.  By far, he’s the worst horror villain ever.  Rachel McAdams made it through the entire movie with barely a scratch.  Cillian Murphy got the throat stab (which by the way, raised the unintentional comedy bar another rung since he had to hold his throat and talk in a raspy voice when speaking a line for the rest of the flick), a high heel stabbed into his thigh, nailed across the face with a field hockey stick, hit by a wooden chair thrown down a flight of stairs, and shot twice.  Needless to say, there was a lot of clapping.  All in all, a great theatre experience.

That basically sums up the movie, except for one glaring hole in the plot.  The whole point of Cillian Murphy threatening Rachel McAdams is so she’ll change the director’s hotel room.  So you think they’d plant a bomb in that specific hotel room, or the room would have a window where a sniper could get a clear shot, or something.  No.  The terrorists go after the director of homeland security with a rocket launcher.  That’s right, a rocket launcher. If you’re using a rocket launcher, it shouldn’t matter what hotel room the dude’s staying in.  The rocket took out about two floors of the hotel!  You’re telling me they needed to go to all this trouble to get him in a specific room?  An absolutely inexcusable oversight.


DeROK’s Take:

As a horror film:  0 Eyebrows

As a comedy:

As an overall movie:

About Derek Hanson

Doctor by day, blogger by night, Derek Hanson is the founder of the Bloguin Network and has been a Patriots fan for more than 20 years.

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