NOT SO FRIENDLY SKIES Last night I saw Red Eye with that Statler to my Waldorf, Vivian C. Wong.

Plot: Lisa (Rachel McAdams) is flying from Texas to Florida after her grandmother's funeral. She's the spunky, can-do manager of a large Miami hotel. Upon arriving at the Dallas airport, she learns that her flight has been cancelled. She winds up having a drink and some conversation with a nice-enough guy named Jackson (Cillian Murphy) at the airport's Tex Mex restaurant. When she boards the eventually-ready plane, Lisa discovers that she and Jackson are seated next to each other. They make awkward banter about the coincidence, and then the fun begins. You see, Lisa and Jackson haven't been seated next to each other by chance; he's actually some sort of terrorist guru, (or "manager," as he puts it,) and he wants Lisa to move the Deputy-Secretary of Homeland Security, who happens to be staying at her hotel, to another room so that his colleagues have a better chance of assassinating him.

Red Eye started off well, but faltered in its second half when it unwisely departed from the confines of the airplane. McAdams and Murphy are very good in their initial scenes with each other. The pre-flight scenes capture the awkwardness of travellers forced to make small talk and the scenes after Murphy reveals what he wants from McAdams are tense and menacing. But once the leads get off the plane, the film resorts to conventional chase scenes, which aren't bad, but aren't exactly riveting either. As the Vivster has observed before, there's a natural tension built-in to submarine movies due to the confines of the setting. There was a similar tension in Red Eye while the characters were on the plane that was lost when they left it. Imagine if, mid-way through a submarine movie, the ships surfaced and the characters chased each other on land. Pretty lame, huh?  ¶ 10:19 AM