Red Eye
Evil Ruskies try and fail to kill the Secretary of Defense (now War). A 9/11, foiled by an hyper competent sexual assault survivor. The best film with plain Helvetica on the opening credits.
Or hero is the hotel concierge cum fixer, the all around bedrock of the whole enterprise. Just as they have a big night, her grandmother dies, so she needs to go to the funeral, and has to take the red eye back to Miami. Her underling is extremely nervous about being left steering such big ship, but she handles it well enough.
On the plane she was almost goaded into reading a Dr Phil book, but flogs it into an unsuspecting woman she meets. There’s some asshole in line that harasses the poor service worker, so she cuts him off as a sign of class solidarity.
Another young guy backs her up, but he parlays that into paying for a drink at the bar, he truly is a smooth operator. She was already mollified by the wine at the funeral, then some woman dumps an entire latte on her, so she could use a drink.
The guy is evasive about his life, but she takes it as a jokey personality. Suddenly they are seated next to each other in the plane, and the banter continues. He only changes stances once the plane is on the air, and how.
She is just a cog in a big plan to kill the secretary of defense with a fucking Javelin from a boat. Truly insane shit, I really wanted to know that backstory, but it’s not that kind of film.
Basically, there’s an hitman outside her father’s house, ready to strike unless she move the secretary of defense to another room with a view. It’s all she needs to do, pull rank or similar.
She tries many things, from warning the clueless self-help reader, dropping the call when the air phone goes down, but the guy doesn’t fall for cheap tricks. He is a black belt in politeness judo.
The real moment when the dude is made is when they are both trapped in the bathroom, the little girl travelling alone notices she is in trouble, but the stewards dismiss her as another mile high club membership.
She goes for the softer approach by distracting him with the story of her chest scar, and then, with the correct foreshadowing, pulls a pen from some teen dude and does an impromptu tracheotomy to her stalker, just in time for disembarking.
He chases her through the terminal nonetheless, but she escapes in the monorail, saves the secretary an his family, then steals a car, and saves his father by running down the hitman with the stolen SUV.
Alas, but our dude with the lady scarf gets to her, they will need to brawl a bit more in her literal childhood bedroom. He is injured with a high heel and an hockey stick, but goes down with the weapon of the killer, with the second shot fired by the injured father.
The killer’s “emotion-based dilemma” is resolved with “male-driven fact-based logic”.
The cast is incredible, Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy are great, Brian Cox doesn’t have much to do, and the underling at the hotel is also amazing. Girl service worker power!
As with most films involving the US Government, it’s kinda silly when you replace the secretary of defense with TripleSecDef, Whiskyleaks, a weekend TV host with American flag suits, and a severe drinking problem.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.