“That’s why God created the Tex-Mex.”

I normally don’t pay much attention to movie trailers. In fact, I tend to actively avoid them (especially modern ones) because they often spoil the entire plot of a movie that I already wanted to see. But sometimes when I already have my mind set on a film I’m nonetheless required to play a promo to convince my wife that it is worth her time as well. I mean, I was perfectly content to check off another film in the Wes Craven filmography when pressing play on Red Eye, but my wife could care less about stuff like that.

Anyway, that’s how I came to watch the ingenious ad for the film, which for the first minute plays out like it’s introducing a romantic comedy. Circumstances bring Lisa (Rachel McAdams) and Jackson (Cillian Murphy) together as they both wait on the same delayed flight from Dallas to Miami, and they strike up an instant, flirtatious friendship, all batting eyelashes and whatnot.

But of course, Red Eye is not a romantic comedy at all (though it is frequently funny). It’s actually a white-knuckle thriller that spends a large portion of its runtime locked in a tense battle of wills 35,000 feet in the air, where it is revealed that Jackson is a domestic terrorist. He threatens to have Lisa’s father (Brian Cox) killed if she doesn’t use her professional connections to help him carry out a political assassination.

The trailer eventually spoils too much of the unbelievable plot, of course, but it’s remarkably in-sync with how the film itself actually plays out. Taut and entertaining, dense with excitations (and some contrivances), Red Eye is a supremely-crafted potboiler that wastes not a single one of its 85 minutes.