The Eye

Jessica Alba stars as a blind violinist who's finding it hard to look on the bright side after her sight-restoring surgery comes with an unwanted bonus: the ability to see dead people!

Therapy for this fright-free, superdull remake of a stylish Hong Kong horror flick is probably not covered by your HMO.

By Alex Markerson Feb 01, 2008 6:58 PMTags
E! Placeholder Image

The Bigger Picture:  It's a miracle there isn't a scene in The Eye where Sydney breaks down and sobs, "Why is this happening to me?" Then again, apart from the vivid hallucinations she's experiencing (Why does a mystical cornea transplant let her hear and smell stuff, too? Anyone?), Sydney's got it pretty easy. The PG-13 ghosts of The Eye aren't a particularly murderous lot—none of them are even having bad postmortem hair days, and a few look more lifelike than Alba.

So, there's nothing in The Eye that's scary enough to warrant closing your eyes. Sadly, there's nothing exciting enough to keep them open, either.

Most of the screen time is wasted on Alba reacting to mildly creepy blurs, and none of them hang around long enough to build any real tension. The balance is eaten up by her tepid attempts to convince the rest of the cast she's not crazy, and they barely seem to care, anyway.

The Eye follows the usual template for cut-rate adaptations of popular Asian horror films: Keep the basic storyline, remove many of the elements that made the original compelling and somehow spend more money to come up with a less stylish look. To be fair to the filmmakers, it's not like a whole lot happened in the 2002 Hong Kong original. It was the how rather than the what that made it worth remaking.

But those ineffable qualities tend to get lost in translation, often resulting in something very much like The Eye: A film more people will see, but far fewer will like.

The 180—a Second Opinion:  If you've got a particularly active imagination, you might get a kick out of seeing The Eye and mentally substituting Renée Zellweger, who was originally cast as the lead, for Alba.