Both The Town (2010) and Red Eye (2005) are B movies. Red Eye knows it; The Town does not.
Red Eye is a fast, efficient, and dim-witted thriller. (Credits will tell you that the movie is 85 minutes long -- but it has a crazily extended list of performers and crew at the end and, according to my assessment, the actual narrative is about 70 minutes in length. Wes Craven, the famous horror director (Last House on the Left, Nightmare on Elm Street, the Scream franchise) made Red Eye and there's no question that he knows what he's doing. Craven is like Clint Eastwood in that he conceives of the picture in terms of editing and acting and makes no effort to provide pretty pictures or directorial flourishes. The camera is always where it needs to be. Lighting is crisp, direct, and bright -- you can see everything and where people and objects are located in space. (It's the sort of camera-work used in comedies to effectively deliver gags -- and, it should be observed that many of Craven's movies skirt the line between horror and comedy, particularly, the Scream slasher movies.) The film's premise is that a plucky young woman who manages a Miami luxury hotel is flying back home from Dallas where she has attended a funeral. She meets a friendly, alluring young man in an airport bar when her flight, a "red-eye" route to Miami, is delayed. On the plane, the young woman (Lisa) finds herself seated next to the young man. It's an omen of things to come when Lisa learns that the young man's name is Jack Rippner. Once the plane is airborne, Rippner tells her that he is some sort of professional terrorist and killer. He is scheming to murder a politician who will be checking into Lisa's lavish waterfront hotel in Miami in only a few hours. Rippner tells Lisa that his confederates will murder her father if she doesn't cooperate with the scheme, a plot to put the politician in a suite of rooms known to the terrorists where he can be assassinated through the use of a rocket-propelled grenade. Lisa is no easy target and not readily intimidated. From the very outset, she fights back against Rippner, endeavoring to get messages to the cabin crew and others as to the villain's evil plans. There are some startling moments of violence, alarming because not telegraphed to the audience -- Rippner head butts Lisa to knock her out, a favor she later returns, and Lisa manages to stick the tip of a ballpoint pen through the bad guy's esophagus, an injury that makes him more menacing because, undeterred, he hustles around wheezing and gasping. The opening scenes in the film are ultra-realistic and the irritable passengers and haughty imperious stewardesses and gate agents will be familiar to most viewers. The verisimilitude of these opening scenes and the claustrophobic sequences on board the plane are devised to lull the viewer into accepting a plot that becomes increasingly idiotic as the movie progresses. Indeed, the final twenty minutes of the picture is, although thrilling, completely implausible and unmotivated. After several chases through the airport, Lisa manages to steal an SUV, drives to her father's home, where she and the villain fight it out. Lisa's lieutenant, an assistant manager at the luxury hotel, is enlisted to defeat the heinous plot. In the last sequence, Lisa plays a version of the "final girl", a kind of protagonist largely invented by Craven -- this is a comely young woman who witnesses the slaughter of all of her friends at the hands of a mad killer; as sole survivor ("the final girl"), the young woman battles the villain, often in some sort of haunted house, and, generally, dispatches him. Rachel McAdams, acting the role of Lisa, is a feisty "final girl" in Red Eye and she batters the villain so effectively that, in the end, the audience is almost tempted to sympathize with him. As soon as the mayhem is complete and the murderous plot foiled, the heroine makes a quip and the movie is done -- it ends as swiftly and efficiently as it began.
I call Red Eye a B-movie. By this I mean that the picture is relatively short, without any ambitions other than to deliver thrills and suspense. The actors in the film are relatively unknown: Rachel McAdams as Lisa, Brian Cox (later to be famous for Succession) as Lisa's father, and Cillian Murphy playing the frightening, nonchalant, and vicious villain. (Murphy is handsome to the point of being androgynous and creepy -- he's like a young Christopher Walken and he uses his eccentric appearance to good effect. The plot in the film is devised to reliably deliver certain suspense and horror set-pieces; otherwise, the narrative isn't really carefully imagined or plausible. Everything is cheaply done: exterior shots of the plane, which are unnecessary in any event, are poorly made -- seemingly some kind of low-grade CGI. There's an explosion but it's also probably generated by a computer. Most importantly, the movie relies upon cliches and stereotypes: the plucky young woman who fights the villain as "the final girl", the ice-cold murderer with just a hint of savoir faire, the doting father and the snotty gate agents and stewardesses and, of course, the stock company of irritated passengers who seem to have come right out of some version of the old movie Airport. There's not a single memorable shot in this movie -- and I mean this as a high compliment. The heroine is given a scar on her collar-bone and she even has some kind of backstory as a rape victim -- but this is just window-dressing; it's like the flashes of lightning that appear through the plane's windows, just some seasoning to an otherwise stale plot.
The Town (Ben Affleck) is B-movie with expensive actors and impressive production values. It's a little bit sad when compared with Red Eye -- at least, Red Eye knows what it is; The Town has fancy affectations on which it can't deliver.
Everything in The Town is a cliche or caricature. The movie doesn't have an ounce of originality. (This defines a B-movie in which variations played on a familiar theme are part of the fun.) The problem is that everything in The Town has been done better in other films. A good example is the setting, Charlestown, an embattled suburb to Boston -- it's right across the river, the place where the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought. The movie involves professional criminals who are said to be ubiquitous in Charlestown. (The film is so scathing as to its portrayal of Charlestown that a closing credit has to remind the viewers that most people in the suburb are not criminals and merely upstanding citizens.) We've been in this terrain involving Irish-American mobsters before. The middle-class crooks and cops are the same people that we met in Mystic River, a much better film. Similar, the mob milieu in Boston has been explored in various movies, most notably Martin Scorsese's The Departed and The Irishman. Ben Affleck plays a righteous, stand-up bank robber -- another cliche deployed by the film. His mob contains various blue-collar crooks including his close friend, a hair-trigger half-crazed thug of the kind played by Joe Pesci in Scorsese crime pictures. There is a promiscous, if warm-hearted, girl from neighborhood who finds herself the rival of a luscious "toonie", the local argot for "yuppie." These people are not particularly ambitious -- they are lower-middle-class folks who aspire to a berth in the middle-middle-class or, at best, the upper middle-class. The "toonie"is a bank worker who gets swept up as a hostage in a bank robbery. After the heist, the hero played by Affleck is assigned the task of tailing the former hostage to verify that she doesn't know the identity of the crooks who robbed the bank. Of course, Affleck's character falls in love with the striving "toonie" girl. Although Affleck wants to go straight, he gets coerced in a final job that turns into an apocalyptic shoot-out at Fenway Park -- the hoods are robbing concession money at the baseball stadium during a game. The plot, which is extremely formulaic, is just a scaffold on which to hang three spectacular set pieces -- the first robbery, a second heist involving a chase through the alleys and narrow streets around Boston's Old North Church and, finally, the big firefight at Fenway Park which plays as a mash-up between Kubrick's The Killling (a heist at a race-track) and the big gun battle in Heat. Affleck's character has a dad who is serving a life turn and who imposes on the hero his code of "fucked-up Irish Omerta" as one of the characters says -- Dad is played by a squint-eyed Chris Cooper in a gratuitous role that is somewhat similar to the part played by Willie Nelson as the elderly convict in Michael Mann's Thief. There are no surprises anywhere in this film -- it follows very strictly ancient genre conventions, including the conceit of the relentless adversary lawman (here played by a ruthless Jon Hamm). The movie is entertaining, well-made, and mindless. There are some sweaty, tasteful sex-scenes with attractive actors. The script is pungent with classic film noir lines and wise-guy talk: the promiscuous local girl who is in love with Affleck's characters says: "If you want to get the tail, you gotta chase the rabbit. My mother told me that." There's a pointless subplot in which the thugs punish a guy who threw a bottle at the "toonie" who is the hero's girlfriend -- they beat him up and, then, knee-cap him. (This seems wildly disproportionate). In this kind of movie, only two outcomes are possible: crime doesn't pay and all the hoodlums end up dead or in prison; or crime does pay and the hoodlum hero gets away to hide, implausibly, off-the-grid in some sort of tropical paradise. If you want to know how The Town turns out you'll have to watch the movie; it's entertaining and well-made but incredibly derivative. If you have to make a choice opt for Red Eye, it's equally entertaining and three-quarters of an hour shorter.
