10 Awesome Movies That Fail In The 3rd Act
7. Red Eye
Wes Craven's 2005 thriller Red Eye was marketed as taking place almost entirely on a plane, as hotel manager Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) is seated next to a terrorist, Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy), who will kill her father (Brian Cox) if she doesn't help him assassinate the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security.
And for its first hour, Red Eye is an absolute blast: the setup is intriguing and snappy, before we're treated to 45 minutes of gut-wrenching, claustrophobic suspense as Lisa attempts to resolve the situation.
But the third act sees the action transition from the sky to the ground as the plane lands, at which point Red Eye evolves into a far more conventional thriller as Lisa scrambles to save both her father and the Deputy Secretary.
After the tension and ingenuity of the confined plane setup, this felt like such a major step down, especially as Murphy's villain acts in considerably less cunning fashion than in the preceding two acts.