The Eye | Review

‘Mun’dane film loses itself in a maze of predictability.

After the success of The Ring (Ringu), Hollywood studio execs have been throwing money around trying to secure the next best thing. While the remake rights to supernatural flicks coming from Asia cinema are being bought out, the originals are making their way to limited screenings. Directors Danny and Oxide Pang’s 2002 model The Eye is a recent example of this current phenomenon as the film’s U.S release coincides with the talks of their already being a possible 2005 Americanized remake. With all due respect to all the other films which I have never seen from this emerging trend of ghostly films with a supernatural touch, which apparently became the nouvelle vogue starting with The Sixth Sense, I personally don’t “see” what all the fuss is about, especially with this purple-tongued licking ghost tale with all the paranormal trimmings.

You’re born in a fast pace society and spend almost your entire life guiding yourself with sound. Basically the potential to gain one’s sight again is well worth the risks of a transplantation procedure…or so it seems. Carrying the torch of the film is this young fragile woman named Mun (Angelica Lee) who goes from blind as a bat to the transformed tortured heroine with a pair of possessed eyes and a little more than what she bargained for. The viewer is then taken on this wait and ‘see’ game, showing us a barrage of outer-world elements and nasty sights.

The Eye comes across like a film tapped out of ideas, where an attempt to push an all out scare fest envelope gets tiring very quickly churning out a film that loses its affect, especially felt in the what potentially should have been the coolest looking sequence of the film with the elevator ride from hell. Most of the film’s problem lies with the story structure and the inconvenience of crossing one too many genres together going from a wacky alien and ghost ride to an unconvincing romantic comedy with a doctor and man who looks to be a preadolescent to an ending that reminds of the ill-fated ending in The Mothman Prophecies. To make matters worse The Pangs brothers could have done so much in the beginning with the blurriness out-of-focus affects to put us more in the protagonist’s shoes, instead this idea gets sped up so that the makers can simmer it up with bad make-up jobs on old people and little children.

Perhaps, the frenzied flashback journey into the past of the eyes wouldn’t seem so slapped on if the first and second acts would have been better treated in terms of the story and the contrast wouldn’t have seem ill placed or paced if the quasi-romantically treated images wouldn’t have been switched into a fast pace jamboree. Instead of The Eye becoming an example of taking an idea to new heights and exploring new territory it settles for the mediocre with things that have been done and said in more recent flicks. Unfortunately the diving into a thriller tailspin and cracked-mirror and double personality interpretations don’t hold up and this report card gets not only a bad grade but is perhaps worth losing.

Rating 1.5 stars