The Eye

The recent trend of horror movies released on Super Bowl weekend continues this year with THE EYE. No, it’s not a Sauron biopic (ba dum chik) but the American remake of the popular Japanese thriller in the vein of THE RING and THE GRUDGE. But horror would be an odd way to describe the film; there are barely any frights to speak of. Instead we are subjected to 100 minutes of Jessica Alba doing her best to act terrified and concerned.

Blind violinist Sydney Wells (Alba) whose sight is restored after a double corneal transplant, but her reconciliation with the visual world does not go as smoothly as planned. She begins seeing things she shouldn’t; people who aren’t really there, rooms shifting into others and dark, unsettling shadowy figures following people around. At first, her sister (Parker Posey) and doctor (Alessandro Nivola) attribute it to mental confusion, but Sydney is convinced there is something supernatural going on. She becomes determined to find whose eyes she has inherited, and what dark secret they possessed that has now been passed to her.

The genuine scares are few and far between. In fact, the scariest thing about THE EYE is the directors’ apparent belief that jump-scares are the only way to frighten an audience these days. Very little effort is put into creating a suspenseful mood. Instead, the film relies mostly on clichés to let an audience know what they should find frightening (people walking too slowly, children repeating lines over and over, flickering lights, etc.) Alba is just barely adequate in her role; she occasionally musters an expression that passes for terror, but she delivers most of her lines in a bright, chipper I’ll-get-through-it-somehow manner. And when she attempts pure drama with gems like, “These eyes aren’t my eyes!”, she doesn’t come off as remotely sincere. Also, I don’t know in what world Jessica Alba and Parker Posey would be sisters, but whatever.

The intriguing premise is shortchanged by its screenplay, and not just because of the golden dialogue as seen above. It seems to have been broken up into parts: set-up, the scary part, the discovery part and the big climax. The scary part isn’t really all that scary, unless you’d be scared by anyone grabbing your arm at any time and in any place. And after that, it gets even worse; it gets boring. The film completely ignores all need to be suspenseful when it begins answering questions, and the answers are far too typical and bland to sustain interest. And the film’s “big” climax may be the shortest, unexciting sequence in a horror film in years.

THE EYE is another step down in the Japanese horror remake trend. Understandably, this is a downward spiral that began when the trend did, but this film is a missed opportunity. It takes a clever premise and only half develops it, favoring instead to churn out something quick that horror junkies and teens will rush to on the first weekend. Well… at least Alba was given better contacts than she was in FANTASTIC FOUR 2. That’s about all that can be said.

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