After he made the third film in his wildly successful Scream series, legendary horror director Craven swore off the genre that had made him famous, vowing to stick to more serious fare like the treacly inspirational drama Music of the Heart he made the year before. Craven didn't have another movie out for five years, and when he did, it was the troubled werewolf flop Cursed, another horror movie. So he's been quick to point out that his latest, Red Eye, is a thriller, not a horror movie, as if the fine distinction will earn him respectability points.
The truth is that Craven, the man behind such classics as A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Hills Have Eyes and the original Scream, doesn't need any of those points. He's a master at delivering scares, and that's exactly what he does in Red Eye, a lean, economical thriller that has virtually no plot and is over so quickly that you won't have time to miss it. It's not a major Craven work, but whether you call it a horror movie, it's full of what he does best.
The premise is simple: Harried hotel manager Lisa (McAdams) is on her way home to Miami from a funeral in Dallas. She meets the handsome, charming Jackson (Murphy) in the airport, and then again on the plane. It turns out that Jackson is a hitman of sorts, and he demands that Lisa switch the room that a top-level government official is staying in so that Jackson's bosses can take him out. If Lisa doesn't comply, her oblivious dad (Cox) will get snuffed out by one of Jackson's compatriots.
The film's middle third, with Lisa and Jackson trapped on the plane, playing a tense game of cat-and-mouse within the claustrophobic confines of the cabin, is top-notch suspense, perfectly paced and shot by Craven and acted by McAdams and Murphy. Murphy's low-key turn as the Scarecrow in Batman Begins was just the tip of the iceberg that is his performance here, rarely raising his voice above a whisper, yet projecting as much menace as any of Craven's more over-the-top villains from past films.
After the characters deplane, Red Eye devolves into a more conventional chase movie, and it wraps up so quickly you may not even realize it's over. But for one tense, nail-biting half hour, it's up there with Craven's best.