Red Eye - 5

The acting and the dialogue are the best parts of the film. The story is interesting but not anything you've not seen before. The film gets a lot of things right about being in an airport and airplane, the long waits, the random conversations, even the excess of Dr. Phil books. But the story is in the end mostly unbelievable because of the crazy plot to kill someone and the main character's ability to do anything about it (that is in real life, in this film she is the hero (which I don't think is a gender specific word, sort of like knights)). The two main characters are played very well by Rachel McAdams (is it just me or does she look like a less plastic Jennifer Garner) and Cillian Murphy (also in Batman Begins and 28 Days Later, both excellent movies). By the end of the film I felt like the plot could have gone in any direction and I wouldn't have cared or been able to tell the difference, she ends up doing the only rational thing she can do, which is fight back with the means that are available. What is annoying about the film is that all the stuff that matters to the plot happens after the plane has landed, so the last twenty minutes of the film is actually about something other than dialogue and claustrophobia. Not a bad film, but it is not a thriller (no twist ending or suspense) or a romantic comedy or a horror film, which means that it can only be labeled, an action flick? Maybe it attempting some new genre, but it really isn't good enough to keep that new genre afloat.