Red Eye (2005)
Wes Craven has long been a thriller/horror director, from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street to the iconic 90s slasher Scream. In 2005, he made Red Eye, a claustrophobic thriller that relies on its two young leads to make the most of its simple premise.
Rachel McAdams plays Lisa, a hotel manager who hates to fly. She’s about to hate it a lot more, thanks to the very menacing Jackson (played by Cillian Murphy) and his ice blue eyes. In perhaps the most contrived terrorist plot ever, Jackson threatens Lisa during a red eye flight to Miami with a choice: She can call her hotel and move the director of Homeland Security into a specific room so that Jackson’s employers can kill him, or she can have her father killed by an associate of Jackson if she doesn’t make that call.
When Lisa first meets Jackson, waiting for their delayed flight, he’s quite a charmer. He buys her a drink before they get on the plane and realize that they sit right next to each other. It’s not until the plane has taken off and there’s nowhere to go that Murphy transitions perfectly from mysterious and intriguing to psychotic and ruthless.
Craven builds on the naturally tight setting of an airplane with extremely close shots, especially on Murphy’s face as he intimidates his victim with murderous stares. The bulk of the film takes place on the plane ride, and it’s here where it’s at its best. Tons of suspense and tension, and although the other passengers are given the minimalest of roles, it doesn’t matter because the leads are so adept.
Rachel McAdams is cute and forceful as Lisa. One of the best things about Craven’s films is his consistently powerful female protagonists, and Lisa is no different. She’s a take-charge, competent, and successful individual, whose only flaw seems to be that she’s a bit too focused on her career. Despite the different ways that any one of us might react to her situation, it’s still easy to root for her and appreciate her different attempts to get out of Murphy’s trap.
Red Eye is full of clever instances, from truly hilarious comments made by background extras to the best damn way to hide a giant missile launcher on a yacht I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, its tense and witty start brings the movie to an uncharacteristically dull third act.
It’s when the characters leave the plane that the movie begins to deteriorate. The plane setting is replaced by Lisa’s house, bringing the story into the real world and shedding light on its unlikelihoods. Worse yet, Lisa’s intelligence and competence is usurped by standard horror victim tendencies - she very frustratingly doesn’t assault Murphy when he’s entirely unarmed, for no reason other than to draw out the movie’s thin premise.
Red Eye is a sometimes witty thriller that enjoys a very terse first hour. The last act is very disappointingly subpar, losing its self awareness and becoming the very generic movie that it seemed like it would rise above. Still, very strong performances by two attractive leads makes Red Eye a movie that’s worth checking out.
Final rating: 6.5/10
—James A. Janisse
The Wolfman (2010)
The Wolfman! One of the classic Universal monsters alongside Dracula, the Mummy, and a handful of others, forever inscribed upon our collective consciousness through continuous revampings and updates. Does the latest reboot of a horror series stand up to the quality of the installments that preceded it? Though I’ve never actually seen any other Wolfman movies, I can only hope that that answer is “no” - the latest interpretation, by director Joe Johnston, is a bad movie in absolutely every regard.
With the evolution of the vampire guiding that iconic monster into tweeny bopping territory, I looked at the apparently dark and violent reboot of the Wolfman as a chance to find a badass monster amidst a current sea of sucky creatures. Unfortunately, this Wolfman film is unintelligible, relentlessly grim, and laughably cheesy. And not cheesy in an intentional campy way. It’s just a bit pathetic.
The Wolfman follows Benicio Del Torro, who returns to his home town after his brother has been killed by a werewolf. He has an estranged relationship with his father, Anthony Hopkins, and a nascent inappropriate relationship with his dead brother’s widow, Emily Blunt. Through in Hugo Weaving as a Scottish inspector, and you have our cast. Our players for our horrible, horrible film.
What makes The Wolfman so bad? Well, for one, the film was plagued by a series of rewrites that resulted in an entirely senseless story. You have to go into this movie expecting things to not make a lick of sense. One of the most glaring examples is when Del Torro is arrested because the townspeople suspect him of being a werewolf after suffering a bite at a gypsy camp. That’s all well and good, but after detaining Del Torro in a mental hospital, the tune of his antagonists changes: Now they insist that Del Torro has made the whole werewolf thing up in his mind, and they are going to hold him in a room to prove to him that his delusions aren’t real.
Wait, what? Yes, they arrest him against his will because he might be a werewolf. Then, as he sits bounded, yelling at his captors to let him go so he won’t kill them, they insist on holding him to prove that he’s NOT a werewolf. Pointless and infuriatingly inconsistent scenes like this tie together werewolf attacks dominated by cheesy deaths and unimpressive CGI gore.
The bad CGI is really disappointing, because one of the few things I can commend the movie on is its werewolf make-up. It’s much more evocative of the original prosthetic make-up that I’ve seen this Wolfman’s ancestors sport, and not bogged down by computer graphics. Had they consistently applied this technique, I would have been able to at least laud the film’s visual effects. However, after designing the Wolfman, it appears as though the film’s crew gave up and fell back on CGI blood obfuscated in the shadows of the hardly-lit settings.
Del Torro himself is gruff and joyless in the lead role. I understand that this is supposed to be a horror movie, but there’s a difference between strong and silent and squinty-eyed and uncharismatic, and unfortunately Del Torro never expands beyond the latter pair of abilities. The once-glorious Anthony Hopkins seems tired and bored, well-aware of the low grade of the material he’s been given to work with. The only actor who makes their part enjoyable is Hugo Weaving as the persistent inspector who will probably show up if they ever unwisely decide to make a sequel to this trash.
The Wolfman suffers from a predictable plot with a foreseeable twist, on top of stale acting, a pastiche story, and a tiring devotion to showing a shot of the moon between every scene. Speaking of which, how long does the story in this film go on for? There is a laughably high frequency of full moons that turn various characters into werewolves. It would have been awesome if the writers had found a way to tell a good story across a couple of full moons instead of an incomprehensible one across many.
No matter how interested you are in werewolves, you shouldn’t bother seeing this movie. Maybe you heard of the werewolf fight, complete with one flaming werewolf - trust me, even that is far more boring than it sounds. This entire film is a dark and muddled mess, and a tragic reboot to a series that obviously has the ability to resonate with multiple generations. Now we just have to wait the three years for this film to be erased from our memory, and perhaps someone will get the Wolfman right. But probably not.
Final rating: 2/10
—James A. Janisse
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