Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
2/14/08
You
hear it all the time, but there really aren't many good leading role for
actresses, especially in mainstream movies. Since making a splash
as the ass-kicking transgenic hero of James Cameron's TV series Dark
Angel, Jessica Alba has taken a lot of critical abuse as a pretty face
with no acting chops. But after seeing her in The Eye, it's
worth reflecting on exactly what she's had to work with up to now.
Other than suiting up as The Invisible Woman in the Fantastic Four
movies (and even that wasn't much of a role in last summer's sequel),
she's been mostly asked to look good in a swimsuit and smile a lot (two
things, granted, that she does exceptionally well). But The Eye
confirms that she's more than just a hottie: tasked with commanding
every scene as a blind woman who finds a cornea transplant to be a mixed
blessing at best, Alba delivers the goods. And she has to, because
The Eye is creepy at times and engaging at others but it is first
and foremost a star vehicle, one which overcomes some conceptual flaws
to deliver 90 minutes of quality B-movie entertainment.
We
know Sydney Wells (Alba) is as smart and refined as she is beautiful because
she's got the movies' go-to career for the smart and refined: concert
violinist. But she's also been blind ever since she and her sister
Helen (Parker Posey) fooled around with firecrackers when she was 5, and
Helen has finally managed to line up a cornea transplant that might finally
release her burden of guilt. The operation, they're told, is a complete
success and within days Sydney is able to see blurry shapes which slowly
form into the people and things she knows only through sound and touch.
Because she's spent almost her entire life without sight, Dr. Paul Faulkner
(Alessandro Nivola) is assigned to help her learn how to interpret a world
of strange sensory input. But he has no idea how strange that new
sense really is: along with the people in the room, Sydney starts
seeing other people: dead ones, to be precise, along with otherworldly
ghouls eager to usher them into the Great Beyond. But there's more
than that: she keeps having visions of being burned alive and other
horrors. Will Sydney figure out the secrets of her new eyes before
it's too late?
The
Eye is a remake of a 2002 Hong Kong film of the same name (unseen by
me), but it's also pretty easily described as an episode of TV's The
Dead Zone horrored-up with elements of The Sixth Sense (including
a very funny wink at the story's debt to M. Night Shayamalan's breakthrough
hit). The early passages are very effective in setting a spooky tone
as directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud make good use of Sydney's slowly
improving vision to taunt us with blurry visions of spooky stuff.
Once she (and we) can see the spooks clearly, they're a more mixed lot:
we really don't need another creepy kid in a raincoat, but a carefully
obscured floating corpse in her building's elevator is all the more showstoppingly
hideous because the movie brilliantly exploits our fear that it might actually
show him to us. There are a few good “Boo!”s, although I was surprised
that the movie never does deliver the goods by springing something on us
through the front door peephole Sydney finally gets to use. I think
a really brilliant horror movie could be made with this general concept:
cursed eyes allowing their recipient to see horrible things that not only
is no one else aware of, but that their other four senses refuse to detect.
Alas,
The Eye is not that movie: once we learn more about the nature
and source of Sydney's visions, it becomes clear that we could just as
easily be watching The Nose, The Ear or The Left Pinkie.
Also, the movie doesn't really seem to have thought through the implications
of the Tour Guide Ghouls she sees escorting/dragging the dead along to
the next plane. They would seem to bear more investigation and interest
than they get, and also to be a pretty hard thing to just leave behind
unexplained. I'd imagine knowing that the last thing I'll do on this
Earth is to learn where a nasty ghoul is going to take me would give me
a few more sleepless nights than it seems to do for any of the movie's
characters. But the visions do hook us into the mystery, and once
we're there, the notion of a previously normal person granted apocalyptic
visions for some higher purpose is a proven winner as long as we're invested
in the characters. And that is the area where The Eye is at
its' best.
Her
role asks Alba to do three major things: invest us in Sydney's goodness
and likability, be first convincingly blind and then to convincingly struggle
with the mechanics of her newfound sight, and finally to wage an emotional
battle against the strange things that happen to her without seeming like
an idiot or a crazy person. She succeeds on all fronts with poise
and charisma: if given the chance, she really could be the star the
Maxim crowd already thinks she is. Nivola takes a bad role and makes
it work by convincing us that Dr. Faulkner isn't just an oblivious idiot:
he's actually kind of a jerk and he's no more interested in this one patient
than any of the many others he must have. I liked that he seems more
impatient with Sydney's case (surely he misses a good dozen tee times during
the film) than sincerely wrong about it. When he finally comes around
and starts helping, it's impossible to know for sure whether he really
buys into her visions, thinks he's got a chance to write a case study Oliver
Sacks would drool over, or has finally realized that he's not going to
get another patient this attractive for a very long time. Posey,
who NEVER plays characters as normal as Helen, does such a good job (and
has such good sibling chemistry with Alba) that I wish she'd had more to
do.
The
Eye is no masterpiece, but it delivers a few thrills, a few chills,
and much better acting than this kind of Far East horror remake with creepy
kids in raincoats usually sports. It's the kind of slick, efficient
and highly likable B-Movie I wish we saw more of on the schedule.
It also stakes Jessica Alba's claim to more (and better) leading roles
in the future. She can still wear the swimsuit if she wants. |
