Summary
Red Eye gets off the ground well enough with a compelling setup, but eventually begins to lose altitude as events strain logic and credibility.
Richard Armitage was built for streaming. Stick this guy in a ropey thriller with any concept you like and he’ll do a halfway decent job of selling the put-upon everyman role. He’s the king of being relatably stressed out, or vaguely sinister and mysterious, or even, if the mood strikes, intermittently sexy. See, for evidence, Netflix thrillers like Stay Close and Fool Me Once from Harlan Coben’s extensive catalogue, and the erotic thriller Obsession, in which Armitage’s character legitimately has sex with a bed for reasons I still don’t understand. Red Eye, which began as an ITV thriller before being transplanted to Hulu for the benefit of an international audience, finds Armitage typically frazzled, only this time several thousand feet in the air.
To be fair, Armitage’s character has plenty to be worried about. He’s Matthew Nolan, a British doctor speaking at a conference in Beijing where he’s stabbed, chased, and involved in a car crash. And that isn’t even the half of it. Once he makes it back to Blighty, he’s promptly arrested at the border and bundled back on a flight to China. As it turns out, there was a woman found dead in the car he crashed who was the daughter of a Party general, and with Britain and China on the cusp of an important energy deal, he’s sacrificed on the altar of geopolitics.
Getting Nolan back to China should be a relatively mundane assignment for Hana Li (Jinh Lusi, Heart of Stone), a London detective constable whose job is to handcuff Nolan to his seat and make nice to a foreign government to keep the wheels greasy. But Red Eye quickly reveals itself to be much more complicated than that. Nolan protests his innocence and is adamant that he’s being framed, and very quickly, people aboard the red eye flight taking him back to Beijing begin to die in mysterious circumstances; heart attacks, random falls during bouts of sudden “turbulence”, that kind of thing. Suddenly, Nolan’s claims look a lot more valid. But who’s trying to kill him? And are they still aboard?
You can’t, of course, have a conspiracy involving two global superpowers without some espionage shenanigans, and for this purpose we have Madeline Delaney (Lesley Sharp, The Full Monty, Catherine Called Birdy), the head of MI5 who seems to have been deliberately left in the dark about what’s really going on between Britain, China, potentially the U.S., and how it all has nuclear – power, not weapons – implications. The terra firma subplots also rope in Li’s half-sister Jess (Jemma Moore, Lockwood & Co., Flashback, Host) for good measure, which feels a bit unlikely but is justified by Jess having previous form leveraging her sister’s position to sniff out a career-making story.
With all the key players introduced and working their own angles, Red Eye picks up. The scenes aboard the plane, while taking a frustratingly long time for anyone to take them seriously given the British government’s initial surety in Nolan’s guilt, are pretty good. There’s something undeniably compelling about an aircraft as a setting, and while neither Nolan nor Li is necessarily an action hero, the script contrives a few effectively tense set-pieces all the same.
It’s the back half of the journey where things begin to lose altitude. The last couple of episodes – there are only six – put feet on the ground for the payoff to a conspiracy that has become a little too broad to follow, and a lot too silly to take seriously. Some incredibly bad decisions are made here that make the character drama ineffective, and the need for twists and turns overrules logical coherence. And the less said about such a wide-ranging plot seeming to turn only on the machinations of a handful of people who are all personally acquainted, the better.
Red Eye is built for a binge, though. Armitage’s dependable presence and Lusi’s no-nonsense heroine turn help to give the material a bit of heft, and the twist-a-plenty story structure keeps you comfortably engaged. It’s a bumpy landing and no mistake, but the flight, I think, is mostly worth it. Just don’t expect a first-class seat.
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