Eye of the Beholder

December 10, 2004

Rated: R Runtime: 107 min Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

What the hell did I just watch?! To sum this one up quickly, the movie sucked.

Ewan McGregor plays “The Eye”, a British agent of some sort whose specialty is surveillance, though his gear isn’t the most subtle stuff I’ve ever seen. The Eye is assigned to find out where a young man is spending the money he’s stealing from his trust fund. Turns out he’s gotten the money for a young lady named Joanna (Ashley Judd) who isn’t exactly who she appears to be.

Around this time we also come to the realization that The Eye isn’t exactly carrying a full deck of cards. He talks to his daughter as if she were with him, but she’s not. Obviously there’s more to this story to be revealed later…

Anyway, the mentally unstable Eye forms an attachment to Joanna based upon what his daughter is telling him. Instead of turning her in for crimes that he’s witnessed her commit, he starts to follow her everywhere she goes. Being a “master of surveillance” he also sets up cameras and microphones so he can keep up with everything she does in private.

Eventually he crosses the line of just watching her, and starts to make his presence felt in various ways. I won’t expand on this in order to stick to our strict “no spoilers” rule, though honestly I think I’d be doing you favor if I just went ahead and told you the ending so you wouldn’t feel any urge at all to waste money on this movie.

To be fair the acting is top notch. Ewan does a better job here than he did in Episode 1 and Ashley proves that she’s very good at playing a bad girl. She’s even kind enough to give us a couple of nude scenes, one from the back (and what a back it is!) and another chest shot when she’s getting into a bathtub. I even liked the way the directory moves us from location to location by zooming in on the snow globes that The Eye collects.

Unfortunately the script is really weak, and there are so many holes in the movie that its impossible to overlook them. The Eye is just not convincing as a surveillance specialist… his equipment is too bulky, his mannerisms aren’t right, he isn’t careful when looking through windows, and he wears the same red jacket through the whole movie. Yeah, that’s subtle.

The plot moves along at a snails pace most of the time, the characters aren’t believable and as such we just don’t care what happens to them. All you end up caring about is looking at your watch to try and figure out when it’s gonna be over. Unless you just have to see Ashley’s nude scenes skip this one. And if you are going for that reason you can leave after she takes a bath, which is thankfully near the beginning of the movie.

Posted by John | Filed Under 1 Stars, Ashley Judd, Drama, Ewan McGregor, Genevieve Bujold, Jason Priestley, K.D. Lang, R, Theatrical