Wes Craven’s Fearful Flying

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

If you want to see dumb people doing dumb stuff, go for a walk: That’s life. If you want to see them while air-conditioned, go to a movie: That’s entertainment! Stupid folk, intentional or otherwise, are as much a part of cinema as cinematography. You could trace one line of movie moron from vaudeville to silent comedy through slapstick, screwball, and farce all the way up to Will Ferrell. Another might consider the damsel in distress from the Griffith to the slasher flick. As for the inadvertent idiots, where to begin? (We might end with the nut jobs in “Asylum.”)


Popular movies are full of wise guys and hepcats, but genuine intelligence is something quite rare. The great fun of “Red Eye,” a frisky new thriller from Wes Craven, has a lot to do with the rigor of its direction, the clarity of its structure, and a refreshing lack of pretension. But “Red Eye” lifts higher still on an unexpected engine: the smartest movie character of 2005.


Her name is Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams), and she’s trying to catch a flight. Her cell phone goes off; a coworker at the posh Miami hotel she manages is having trouble with some regulars. Springing from the taxi, dashing into the airport, Lisa walks her flustered subordinate through the situation without the slightest twitch of exasperation. She’s an unflappable problem-solver, cool and collected even in the worst of circumstances: Her grandmother has just died.


Snarled in the check-in line, she meets Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy), a disarming assemblage of cheekbone, butane-blue eyes, and gentle, seductive confidence. They share a drink, flirt, joke about his name, and wind up sitting next to each other on the red eye to Miami. Very sexy. Very convenient.


If you’ve seen the trailer, you know more than you should. But not even a transcription of the screenplay would detract from the zing of the thing in motion. Jackson is no random stranger. He is a freelance black-op type plotting the assassination of a Homeland Security bigwig about to check into Lisa’s hotel. Make a call, move him to a different suite, and everyone (or most everyone) will make it out alive. Dad (Brian Cox), you see, is being held hostage by Jackson’s attack dog on the ground, and if Lisa doesn’t do as told, he’ll let go of the leash.


What’s a girl to do? Everything she can and then some. The middle section of “Red Eye” is a claustrophobic cat-and-mouse scenario, in which Lisa uses everything at hand – a pen, a bluff, a bar of soap – to scamper free of Jackson’s trap. Doodled in the margins of their conflict is some light satire of the fellow passengers, including a leather skinned Miami skank, an overly enthusiastic senior, and some surly teens. The wit of the picture can be seen in the way it establishes the character of the preternaturally alert young girl traveling alone – the Dakota Fanning type – but keeps her coiled in the background till the exact moment she needs to be sprung.


The whole movie’s engineered like that: tight, smooth, everything in its place, humming. The pre-flight setup has the sly, supple swing of De Palma at his best. The snarkiness of Mr. Craven’s “Scream” flicks has been replaced by the rich, healthy humor of any well-engineered suspense picture, the comedy of Hitchcock and Chabrol. Mr. Craven’s not in their league – his best bits are stunning, never sublime – but the final stretch of “Red Eye” is an amazingly sustained tour de force.


You’ve seen it a million times: the heroine gets home, things seem okay, out springs the baddie, they run around the house. Mr. Craven heats up this chestnut till it burns. No one in the theater will yell “girl, you crazy!” because Lisa knows every square inch of the joint, and sprints about chucking every chair, vase, and tchotchke she can at the face of her pursuer. This is, in the context we’re dealing with, splendidly intelligent behavior. It synchs with everything we know about the character, propelling the sequence swiftly, gracefully forward.


And then a masterstroke: Jackson wises up to her patterns, and slowly backs out a doorway he was about to go through. The dynamic of the chase is instantly flipped, and the tension goes through the roof. You’d cheer if you weren’t riveted in place, but there are other opportunities for that; “Red Eye” earns more than one whoop of satisfaction. Better late than never, here’s the crackerjack popcorn flick you’ve been jonesing for all summer.


***


“Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” is the story of a young deaf-mute with green hair (Shin Ha-Kyun) desperate to finance an organ transplant for his sister (Im Ji-Eun). After he’s ripped up and ripped off by black market organ traffickers, he plots the kidnapping and ransom of a young girl (Han Bo-Bae), the daughter of his former boss (Song Kang-Ho). Things do not go as planned – or rather, they go exactly as planned by the film’s bloody-minded director, Park Chanwook. Sympathetic or not, the characters mete out grisly retribution on their nemeses – electroshock torture is the least of it – as the movie escalates into grim, hysterical tragedy.


None of which matters in the slightest because “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” is, as the saying goes, an exercise in style. There’s not a shot in the film that hasn’t been arranged into some fiendishly clever contraption; it’s an unrelenting tableaux thrill-ride. Mr. Park is crazy about symmetry, mad for abstraction, wild over geometry, silhouettes, and foreshortening. His camera pole-vaults through depth of field; there’s no telling where the crane shots will take you. If ever a mise-en-scene mugged for attention, this is it.


Mr. Park’s application of stylistic extravagance to the pulpiest of fictions has divided critics over his importance and stirred up the age-old debates over style versus content, the ethics of exploitation cinema, and the fine line between master and hack. Things came to head when his last film, an aggressive hunk of spectacle called “Old Boy,” walked off with a big prize at Cannes, and will likely continue with the upcoming release of “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance,” the concluding entry in his “revenge trilogy.”


He isn’t worth the fuss. These movies are less pretentious than the case made for them by his adherents (“A revenge tragedy as brutal and Byzantine as ‘Titus Andronicus'”). Does he go too far? He doesn’t go far enough. There are nifty jolts of filmmaking here, and some memorably vivid images (though none on par with the infamous octopus gobble in “Old Boy”).


But if gonzo spectacle is what you’re after, “2046” or “The Con formist” make “Sympathy” look like Tsai Ming-Liang. Hankering for a glob of next-level Asian extremity? Search out Takeshi Miike’s mind-blowing “Izo.” Keen for a taste of Korean malaise? Sit through a Hang Sang-Soo picture. And if you just want to pass a dog day of summer cooling off to white-hot genre filmmaking, book your ticket on “Red Eye.”


What To See This Weekend


2046 (Sunshine & Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, 212-330-8182) Wong Kar Wai’s ravishing cinemascope sequel to “In the Mood for Love” locks its gaze on a Hong Kong journalist (Tony Leung) as he tangos through time, space, and memory with several of the most beautiful women in the world (Ziyi Zhang, Gong Li, Faye Wong, Maggie Cheung).


Darwin’s Nightmare (IFC Center, 212-924-7771) No, not the Kansas Board of Education, but a savage panorama of globalization’s effect on the physical and spiritual ecology of Tanzania. Filmmaker Hubert Sauper lends his documentary the hallucinatory grip of apocalyptic science fiction.


Mimic (MoMA, 212-708-9400) Mutant insects are running amok in the New York subway system and only Mira Sorvino can stop them! Revisit Guillermo del Toro’s bug noir in the (presumably) cockroach-free sublevel of MoMA – and keep telling yourself it’s only the N/R rumbling under your seat.


The New York Sun

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