The Eye

Too busy turning Nicholas Cage into a blind hit man for a Hollywood remake of their first feature, Bangkok Dangerous, Danny and Oxide Pang weren’t around to oversee this paltry English- language remounting of their 2002 breakthrough, The Eye. A pity for sure as the resulting film is another in a long line of poor studio remakes of Asian horror films. Xavier Palud and David Moreau’s The Eye carries little of the visual pizzazz or narrative thrust of the Pangs's original and imposes an ending that sheds the appealing ambiguity of the first film.

To be sure, Palud and Moreau aren’t working with source material as strong as Jim Sonzero was with Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse or Walter Salles with Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water. However, the Pang brothers' film does offer the fascinating opportunity to create rhetorical analogies for recovery from blindness and to create some unsettling moments for the audience without relying on shock cutting, overbearing sound design, and monster effects.

Jessica Alba stars as Sydney, a woman in her mid-twenties, blinded at age five by an accident involving firecrackers. Despite her disability, Sydney leads a rather charmed life. She has a gorgeous apartment in a posh L.A. high rise, is a leading violin player in the Los Angeles symphony orchestra, and has a slew of suitors. Early in the film, her sight is restored during a cornea transplant. She immediately glimpses her overbearing sister for the first time, played with a thorough lack of conviction by Parker Posey, and begins to readjust to her new life with the help of Dr. Paul Faulkner (Alessandro Nivola, who, as usual, is almost always better than the material he’s given).

Soon, however, Sydney’s life is thrown for a loop; she is haunted by ostensibly terrifying visions of death itself capturing the recently deceased and taking them away to some Hell-like oblivion, whatever lies on the other side. Of course, everyone begins to think Sydney’s crazy, perhaps schizophrenic, certainly reacting to the shock of having her sight restored. Pushed to the brink of sanity, Sydney must discover whose eyes she has inherited and what secret visions she is beholding in her waking moments and her darkest dreams.  This leads her to Mexico, and what follows involves the critically underused Rachel Ticotin (where have you been since Total Recall?), imperiled children, dangerous Mexican factories, a small helping of poetic justice, and one hell of an explosion. Everything is tidied up pretty well, Moreau and Palud having successfully navigated us through another retread of an almost striking concept. The Sixth Sense this is not; for Asian horror remake enthusiasts (are you out there?) only.

                                                           Brandon Harris