Forget all those heart-on-the-sleeve documentaries; the most reliable gauge of America's social climate has always been its genre films. Unless you count The Passion of the Christ, which dripped enough blood for your average drive-in, George Romero fired first with Land of the Dead, siccing his zombies on Abu Ghraib and a W-quoting Dennis Hopper. Now fellow horror maestro Wes Craven turns an airborne suspense thriller into a paean to post-9/11 American resilience.

Rachel McAdams stars as Lisa Reisert, a high-strung hotel manager flying home after her grandmother's funeral. She not so coincidentally winds up sitting next to Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy), a terrorist-for-hire assisting in the assassination of the deputy secretary of homeland security, soon to arrive at Lisa's hotel. Once they leave the tarmac, Rippner demands that she change the secretary's room to a more easily-targeted one, lest his associates murder her father.

The plot is fairly ludicrous, though Craven paces the proceedings so briskly that there is scarcely time to breathe, let alone question their credibility. Clocking in under 90 minutes, Red Eye contains no fat, no superfluous story elements to distract from the thin story's hurtling trajectory.

The flag-waving in Carl Ellsworth's script is never overt, and Craven goes out of his way to avoid reference to the current geopolitical situation. Murphy is as Anglo as they come, and the terrorists he works for are white and speak in a vaguely Eastern European patois. But the movie's hand is revealed through two lines of McAdams' dialogue. The first refers to a rape in Reisert's past that left her scarred and taught her one thing: "It will never happen again." Then, in the frantic moments as Reisert struggles to save her father, Rippner reappears at her house, threatening to finish the job. "Not in my home," she tells him, and the climactic slasher-film chase for once leaves the killer much the worse for wear.

The initial airport scenes are a compendium of modern complaints: incessant delays; chatty, Dr. Phil-loving travelers; flight attendants bitching about losing their pensions. Craven's attention to these minor annoyances is paid off by Reisert's ingenuity once she gains home-field advantage, celebrating the power of the familiar and the mundane. What could be more American?

It may seem odd that the man behind the sleazy rape-revenge exploitation of The Last House on the Left is now responsible for a Die Hard for the Fox News crowd. But that's what we have, an action thriller where driven, apple-pie types save their well-intentioned public officials with good ole American willpower and vigilance. Just keep telling yourself: It's only a movie.

Red Eye Directed by Wes Craven A DreamWorks release Opens Friday at area theaters