Summary
Red Eye was a show with no real need for a sequel, which is very evident all throughout Season 2, a lacklustre thriller with barely any relation to its already so-so predecessor.
It might take an effort to remember now, since it passed by without much fuss, but the first season of Red Eye, which aired on ITV in the UK and Hulu in the US a while after that, kind of fell apart by the end. It also didn’t lend itself especially well to a sequel, which is perhaps why Season 2, outside of a couple of returning characters and someone contriving an excuse to say the title out loud, doesn’t have anything at all to do with it.
This turns out not to be a particularly great thing. The first season, for all its flaws, excelled in two key areas. The first and most obvious was the claustrophobic airplane setting, and while there’s a bit of plane business in this follow-up, most of the action is depressingly on terra firma. And the second was the emotional hook of an innocent man being thrust into a geopolitical conspiracy. There’s another one of those, granted, but all the main characters are up for it, depriving the audience of a relatable surrogate.
This brings me to my next point: Richard Armitage is gone. His character, Matthew Nolan, is no longer the protagonist, and we never discover whether he got around to asking DS Hana Li (Jing Lusi) out, which in hindsight is probably just as well. In his place is the ever-dependable Martin Compston, who’s playing the U.S. Embassy’s head of regional security, Brody. We know that Hana and Brody have a past, since minutes after finding him poking around the murder of a diplomatic courier at Heathrow Airport, someone asks her, “Brody is the partner that nearly killed your instructor?” Everyone in Red Eye Season 2 speaks this way, in gobs of artless exposition, since apparently nobody involved in it ever read Screenwriting 101.
Hana and Brody both find themselves embroiled in a bizarre scenario in the U.S. embassy, where a murderous infiltrator, possibly Russian, is on the loose after bypassing security by, and I kid you not, slipping something metal in someone else’s pocket while waiting in the metal detector queue. The plan turns out to be a bit more sophisticated than this in its broad strokes, but I’m not sure I’d be hiring Brody to run security in my house, let alone somewhere heads of state might congregate.
This is connected to the B-plot of the season, which finds British security service muckety-muck Madeline Delaney (Lesley Sharp, who was miscast in the first season and isn’t faring any better here) on a plane from the U.S. to the U.K. with the British secretary of defence, Peterson (Jonathan Aris). There’s a bomb aboard, so the aircraft can’t divert from its course or drop below 20,000 feet, but the Speed-like premise doesn’t capture any of that sort of tension. It’s mostly just Delaney telling everyone to keep calm while she makes phone calls.
The two-pronged investigation is engaging enough. You could, if you were being charitable, read it as a commentary on how generally shoddy Britain’s intelligence and security apparatus is, but I think that’s probably more a consequence of the kind of limp writing that compels every character to explain exactly what they’re doing and why every five minutes, just to ensure the audience is keeping up. There are some fun turns, and a handful of decent action sequences – Jing Lusi once again acquits herself most admirably – but this is a franchise with only intermittent thrills, and an extremely limited amount of sense.
If you were to point to the dictionary definition of forgettable one-off thrillers that absolutely didn’t need a sequel, Red Eye would be right there. It’s a decent enough evening – it only runs six episodes, which is a mercy – but one that’ll actively insult your intelligence if you try to take it too seriously. Perhaps it’s best not to, but frankly, the most cogent advice is to avoid taking off entirely and spare yourself a bumpy journey.
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