Cillian Murphy has had the pleasure of working with masterful directors his entire career from Danny Boyle to Christopher Nolan. This career phenomenon finally paid off when his association with Nolan got him to the level of an Oscar, but that was a long road to hoe.
After Murphy’s first film with Nolan wrapped (that being Batman Begins), he stepped onto the set of another renowned master of suspense – Wes Craven. The film was Red Eye, a political thriller on a plane with no snakes. It also starred Rachel McAdams whom Murphy would share most of his screen time.
That would be a golden opportunity most actors would relish or look back fondly on, but that isn’t quite true for the Oppenheimer star. Though he had fun, he recalled in a GQ cover story, he thinks of it as more of a B-picture that’s good in that sense, but not on the standard scale.
“I love Rachel McAdams and we had fun making it,” Murphy told the magazine. “But I don’t think it’s a good movie. It’s a good B movie.” To be fair, he is used to higher-brow stuff with the obvious exceptions of Red Eye and 28 Days Later. “B” or not, the actor brought a lot of the same energy he beamed into Scarecrow in Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy.
In Craven’s film, Murphy plays an equally dapper sower of fear and chaos as Jonathan Crane who is named Jack Rippner (no, really). Hired by terrorists, he holds Lisa (McAdams) hostage quietly on a flight to further a plot to assassinate a politician.
Like Crane, Rippner could come across as straight-laced one minute and coldly vicious the next. “I think it’s the duality of it. It’s why I wanted to play it,” Murphy added in GQ. “That two thing. The nice guy and the bad guy in one. The only reason it appealed to me is you could do that turn, you know?”
He hasn’t been kind to the film after making it, but Murphy told Uproxx in 2021 that he saves his harshest criticisms for himself. “The honest answer is I haven’t seen that movie since it came out like 15 or 16 years ago, whenever it was. I also think that, when I was a younger actor, I was really, really hard on everything that I was in,” he said.
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“I hated watching myself. I hated looking at myself on screen. I remember when I saw it was like ‘Oh, that’s kind of a schlocky B movie. Rachel McAdams is excellent in it.’ But I didn’t think I gave a very nuanced performance in it,” Murphy added.
A lot of folks disagree with that assessment. Red Eye has fans who defend it as a sharp thriller. Roger Ebert’s review at the time gave it a passing grade and glowed about the pace, Craven’s direction, and McAdams’s grounded performance.
It fared well commercially and critically, and just because it didn’t spawn a sequel like Scream or A Nightmare On Elm Street, doesn’t mean it isn’t as good as other beloved entries in Craven’s filmography.
The late horror maven made plenty of duds, too (Cursed, Hills Have Eyes 2, My Soul To Take, The Serpent and the Rainbow). Up against any of them, Red Eye stands out luminously as a bright spot.
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