REVIEWED - RED EYE: Wes Craven's snappy thriller will keep you on the edge of your seat right up to the ludicrous finale, writes Michael Dwyer

WES Craven follows Cursed, one of the worst movies of the year, and takes a welcome break from the nudging limp humour of his Scream franchise to make a long overdue return to form with Red Eye. Most of the movie takes place aboard an overnight flight from Dallas to Miami, and the convincing scenes of severe turbulence ensure it will never play as an in-flight movie.

Red Eye opens in the style of the 1970s Airport series by introducing stereotypically diverse passengers to be utilised later for dramatic purposes: a friendly elderly woman, a belligerent middle-aged man, two bratty geeks, a young girl flying alone. The focus, however, is on two passengers seated next to each other, Miami hotel manager Lisa Reisert and the flirtatious and archly named Jackson Rippner.

Reisert's resourcefulness and quick-thinking responses to professional problems are demonstrated in the prologue, but she's faced with an unprecedented challenge when Rippner casually describes his work as "government overthrows, high-profile assassinations" and she realises she is a pawn in his latest assignment, which involves her own father and the US deputy secretary for homeland security.

Working from a neat, lean screenplay by Carl Ellsworth and injecting the drama with sly humour, Craven briskly turns up the tension, making very efficient use of the flight's confined spaces. It's unfortunate, then, that when the plane hits the tarmac, this mostly satisfying thriller loses the run of itself in the pantomime that is the last reel.

Craven's ace card is his casting of the leading roles, with the versatile Rachel McAdams (Mean Girls, The Notebook, Wedding Crashers) and Irish actor Cillian Murphy, who switches from charm to menace without missing a beat and even remains admirably straight-faced for the ludicrous finale.