Director Wes Craven creates a bumpy flight for fright fans

Red Eye, the new airline thriller that opens today, arrives (along with a handful of airline thrillers circling the skies, waiting for a landing this fall) on a carefully tended timetable. It works like this: Movies often take two years to get made, from pitch to production to marketing to release. Two years after 9/11 was enough for Hollywood to begin considering sensitive subjects again.

Two years after that - voil.

Movies explicitly referencing that day and everything tied to it will be in abundance over the next half-dozen months. For instance, air travel is OK to exploit again. (Even Oliver Stone is making a film about 9/11, the day; risky, sure, but what does Oliver Stone have to lose - the respect of our nation's history teachers?)

Then there's Wes Craven's Red Eye, and what's so effective about it - right up until the midway point, when it stops being effective at all - is how it stays simple and plays on our thoughts of what we would do if we found ourselves beside a terrorist. Craven, a consummate ham, approaches the idea on a purely visceral level, but it's enough - for the moment. The response to that conundrum, so far, has been largely addressed by novels: the narrator of Chris Cleave's new book, Incendiary, about a woman whose family is killed during a terrorist attack on a London soccer stadium, writes a long letter to Osama bin Laden; in Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days, another woman connects so fiercely with the child terrorists descending on Manhattan (they hug you, then blow themselves up) she adopts one.

Those are complicated, cognitive responses to terrorism, and Craven's films are more like blunt objects.

His response is similar to a great comeback you think of after it's too late. And Rachel McAdams - whose star is in fast ascent after Wedding Crashers and The Notebook - is ideal for the job.

As gangly as Julia Roberts, but of this world, her smile is 20 feet tall, and though she's as self-satisfied as Reese Witherspoon, her diction isn't as hyper-precise. She's easier to relate to. The way she reacts to a bad man beside her is how you'd react: She looks scared. She vomits. She shakes continuously. She freaks. Then she learns to fight back. How they meet is just as believable.

He's a little bit forward and she's a little bit bored. Played by Cillian Murphy, the unnervingly still actor who played Scarecrow in Batman Begins, his name is Jackson Rippner. Craven can't resist: That's Jack Ripper to his friends. Which is enough information to excuse yourself and find an airport Starbucks, but our heroine, a workaholic (and lonely), trudges forward. They find themselves in the same row.

He checks his watch - it looks suspiciously like a stop watch. He scrunches his face at children. When he spots the Dr. Phil book she's reading, he siiiiighs.

The man is a monster.

Lisa (McAdams) doesn't notice until it's too late. But Craven is so clearly relishing the opportunity to make a thriller without needless complications (he did the Scream pictures and the first Nightmare on Elm Streets), we forgive him the absurdity of the details. Besides, it's late in the season and one joy of summer is the incredibly ridiculous film you like anyway, and Red Eye is nicely low-impact - despite the scenario, or in spite of it: As if forgetting he's not making Scream 4, Craven even concocts the most laughable excuse in months to get an actress stripped to a bra.

Jackson, he reveals not long into the film, is a freelance terrorist (which gets Sony out of a profiling jam). He's been watching Lisa for months: She's manager of a Miami hotel where the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security vacations. Indeed, he'll be there a few hours from now.

Never fussy with his cameras or coy with his meanings, Craven establishes the situation with economy; if Joel Schumacher can make a thriller in a phone booth, he can make one that rarely leaves two seats in an airliner. To ensure cooperation Jackson shows Lisa her father's wallet: Don't ask how we got it.

Just cooperate.

Or dad dies. And that's it.

Or rather, I wish that were it. Director's adore situations this streamlined: It reminds them of the mechanics of filmmaking that matter, and gets names like Hitchcock attached. So what's shocking about Red Eye is not the outcome but how Craven betrays what so obviously works.

Though the movie is a mere 85 minutes, he ends the flight too abruptly and sends our heroine into Miami. We get explosions, chases, and more egregiously, the very serial killer stalking you thought Craven had sworn off. It takes the edge off the menace. You can take the guy out of the spook house, I guess, but you can't take the - well, you know.

Less is more.

Contact Christopher Borrelli at: cborrelli@theblade.com

or 419-724-6117.

First Published August 19, 2005, 2:52 p.m.