Photo Credit: ©2005, DreamWorks Pictures.

I’m not sure how I’m supposed to write a review about a movie that isn’t thrilling, isn’t funny, isn’t exciting, isn’t dramatic, but is, in a word, boring.

On second thought, “vacuous” is a better word.

If I must try to summarize, however, Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) is a hotel manager who maintains the tenuous belief that the customer is always right. We know this because, lo and behold, the film opens with a customer in need of better service than Reisert’s in-charge is prepared to provide, which begs the question: Why would such a conscientious hospitality manager leave an inexperienced management trainee in charge of a hotel which frequently accomodates the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security?

This is but one example of the myriad lapses of logic in this film. Not that I believe everything in life is always run so smoothly, but it’s as if the entire film depends on a series of stupid decisions—one after another. Can we count on the main story involving some harm that will befall the Deputy Secretary? Does the one and only boat along the entire Miami coast have some role to play in this immediately transparent plot? Will Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy) encounter the impatient customer at the check-in line, again, later on in the movie? Will that field hockey stick Lisa’s holding in a photograph shown in the first scene somehow be put to convenient use later on? What about that kid in the headphones who keeps getting screen time—might he just be the deus ex machina?

If it seems like I haven’t told you much about the movie… Unfortunately, I just did. I’m reminded of “The Thirteenth Floor,” but this isn’t a movie about characters living in a world that seems quite probably fabricated. This is a movie about characters inhabiting a story erected so poorly that the action sequences seem to avoid knocking holes into set pieces just to ensure you don’t spot crew members loitering and snickering behind them. In plot and character, there are so few elements to this film that if but one of them were removed from its place, the entire film would come crashing down on your head. I’d have a punchline to that observation, but I’m too irritated to think of one. The film could at least have been unintentionally funny and therefore entertaining in a mediocre but passable sort of way. It wasn’t.

That’s too bad, because I was expecting Wes Craven to be capable of at least injecting some humor to break up the monotony—the entire first hour consists of nothing more than dialogue that neither moves the story forward nor gives us some impression the characters are more than just cardboard cutouts. The first and second installments of “Scream” were clever, fresh and entertaining, as was the first “Nightmare on Elm Street” film. Here, one of the few instances of laughter was elicited by, well, an unintentionally funny, not to mention medically improbable, situation. If only South Park hadn’t completely exhausted every possible offending scenario involving the one-armed, military surprlus-store owner with the artificial voicebox, the laughter might not have been so abruptly terminated by the audience’s realization that the humor seems absurdly misplaced, given its context.

This is a paint-by-numbers kind of film that might appeal to some teenagers—if “The Island” weren’t still playing. In my review of that movie, I noted that it began in an interesting direction. “Red-Eye” begins going nowhere. We learn next to nothing about Jackson except, in an oddly-open admission to Reisert, that he is involved in plots to overthrow governments. This is an operation so clandestine that the security detail parked at the Deputy Secretary’s suite doesn’t keep watch on that solitary boat for even one second after the Coast Guard departs—the exact moment something slips beneath the radar. Apparently, the security guards don’t watch movies.

Maybe I missed something here. Reisert’s catching the red-eye flight back to Miami because she was at her grandmother’s funeral. Yet, Jackson’s plot has to have been in the works for weeks if not months. If we even accept that Jackson could have the resources to follow Reisert’s every move and make last-minute flight arrangements to follow her there and back from an unplanned tragedy… Where exactly is the sense in having a plot to impact our nation’s security hinge on what seems like a logistical nightmare? On top of that, they have to position a boat in the middle of the ocean, where alone it couldn’t possibly seem conspicuous (could it?) just so it’s necessary to require Reisert’s help to move the Deputy Secretary into a different room. Why not simply park a guy with a rocket launcher on the busier side of town, to take out the original room? There, he’s less likely to be spotted by the security detail, and he has a number of alternate avenues of exit. Incidentally, this vastly simpler plan would make Reisert completely superfluous to the equation.

Also, I find a missed opportunity in the fact that the film, oddly, is set in the cabin of a 767—a plane normally chartered for transcontinental flights. In a thriller about being trapped with a maniac on a plane, why use one that is, by commercial aviation standards, cavernous?

Some may argue that the focus here is the psychological play between Reisert and Jackson. However, screwing with Reisert’s head is not an end unto itself for Jackson. He makes it clear to her, and the audience, that his primary motivation is the price attached to the assassination of the Deputy Secretary. That makes the warped logic of his plans rather relevant to the situation. Suspense relies on creating a real sense of danger. To do so, a story must maintain some connection with reality in order for us to relate and suspend our disbelief long enough to feel genuine tension without being interrupted by the nagging thought that this sequence of events is made possible only by a monumental cascade of stupidity.

The plot is so flimsy that it never occurs to Reisert that she is holding all the cards… well, at least not until the moment the plot needs it to occur to her. The movie wants us to believe that Reisert is not easily victimized. She’s established in the opening scene as a person who takes command of a situation and turns it around. Sadly, the film does a 180 degree turn with her character. When it’s time to demonstrate that she’s ingenious enough to pretend to be calling in the room change on the phone, she’s not ingenious enough to keep Jackson’s attention away from the other phones before Jackson notices they’re not working. She’s ingenious enough to write a call for help on a book, then on the bathroom mirror, but not ingenious enough to distract Jackson, again, who catches each of these attempts at just the right time.

Reisert is observant and resourceful enough to be not only the manager of the preferred hotel of the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, but also a close friend to him. However, she still can’t figure out that screaming “RAPE” or “BOMB” on a plane would pretty much wreak enough havoc to shut down Jackson’s operation before he has a chance to give the go-ahead to the assassin parked outside her father’s house who, by the way, won’t move unless Jackson gives the order. We know that, as well as what car he’s driving, because Jackson (in other words, the screenwriter) is dumb enough to tell her. She fails to recognize the advantage is hers despite the fact that Jackson allows her to call her father and confirm he’s alone and unharmed. If you want to coerce someone into doing something for you, usually it makes sense to already have the bargaining chip in hand.

One therefore wonders how the writer of this screenplay got paid anything at all.