B-

Wes Craven shows that he still knows the moves in this inherently silly but efficient little thriller about a woman blackmailed into facilitating a terrorist assassination who turns the tables on the villains and foils their dastardly plot. Carl Ellsworth’s script–his first to be produced–isn’t much more than a variation on “The Man Who Knew Too Much” done up in the style of Larry Cohen’s “Phone Booth” and “Cellular,” with a dash of “Wait Until Dark” thrown in for good measure in the cat-and-mouse finale. But thanks to Craven’s nimble direction (far better than what either Joel Schumacher or David R. Ellis brought to Cohen’s stories, the second of which was rewritten by Chris Morgan), another winning turn from Rachel McAdams (“The Notebook,” “Wedding Crashers”), and a performance by Cillian Murphy that effectively mingles good-guy attractiveness with reptilian nastiness, the picture, despite some predictable narrative stumbles–especially the inevitable occasions when phones fail to work when most needed (the contemporary equivalent of car engines refusing to turn over when victims urgently need them to start)–becomes, especially in the last half-hour, a genuinely white-knuckle cinematic flight despite its overwhelming lack of plausibility.

McAdams plays Lisa Reisert, a hard-driving hotel executive returning to her Miami job after attending her grandmother’s funeral in Dallas. On the late-night flight she meets a fellow traveler named Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy), an ostensibly courteous and considerate guy but one with a dark gleam in his eye even at his most charming. No sooner has the plane taken off, however, than he turns threatening, telling Lisa that his confederates will kill her father (Brian Cox) unless she calls her assistant Cynthia (Jayma Mays) and instructs her to move one of the hotel’s guests, Charles Keele (Jack Scalia), who just happens to be the Deputy Director of Homeland Security, to a different suite, where–it’s soon revealed–he and his family can more easily be killed. For roughly an hour of the spiffy 85-minute running time, the action is confined to the plane, where Lisa tries to outwit Rippner and keep from making the call; the remainder follows the landing, and involves Lisa’s race to save both Keele and her father, pursued all the time by the implacable (if somewhat worse-for-wear) Rippner.

There are plenty of genre cliches in “Red Eye,” those malfunctioning phones being only the most annoying. And frankly the MacGuffin–Secretary Keele–is an even worse invention than the foreign dignitary in Hitchcock’s film, not because we know less about him but because we know more. Hitch’s guy was just a title attached to the information that his murder would cause war to break out. And we really don’t need to be told anything more about Keele than his office, either. Showing us that he’s a decent family guy with a supposedly tough streak is not only unnecessary but cheesy, especially because Scalia plays him with such blandness. The last-act chase through the airport, moreover, is almost risibly over-the-top. And the whole assassination scenario goes over the line, involving a bunch of guys on a fishing boat muttering in some unrecognizable foreign dialect who are supposedly such perfect marksmen that they can hit a single window in a high-rise building from a considerable distance with a shoulder-held missile. Talk about smart bombs.

And yet despite all this, the fast-moving “Red Eye” works during its relatively brief running-time. Crisply edited by Patrick Lussier and Stuart Levy, the picture sprints along quickly enough to make you either overlook the inanities or forgive them for the duration. Though it hits some narrative potholes and logical turbulence, it takes you where Craven wants you to go.