The Lazy Eye

Jessica Alba continues to unimpress with remake of Hong Kong horror film

For all of the attention given Jessica Alba in her brief acting career, she has participated in exactly one good movie: Sin City. While it’s hard to lay the blame for the relative lameness of movies such as Into the Blue, Good Luck Chuck or Honey on Alba’s head alone, at some point she needs to take responsibility for her career and start picking better scripts.

Her latest cinematic venture, the American remake of the Hong Kong horror movie, The Eye, will probably do little to ignite her career, but it is a better film than much of which is already on her résumé.

In The Eye Alba stars as Sydney Wells, a professional violin player who has been blind since she was five. Her sister Helen (Parker Posey) convinces her to have corneal replacement surgery to restore her sight. Helen feels guilty for her role in the fireworks accident that blinded her sister and Sydney agrees to have the surgery as much for her sister as for her own desire to see.

Although Sydney’s surgery is technically a success, her vision is extremely blurry at first. She is also plagued with visions of dark monsters that seem to enter the picture whenever someone is about to die. While some of her visions seem to take place in the past, others appear to be visions of ominous events that will take place in the future.

As her actual vision improves and she begins to join the world of the seeing, her apparitions also get stronger. Sydney becomes convinced that her eyes are possessed by the experiences of the dead woman that was her organ donor.

Sydney enlists the help of a psychiatrist named Dr. Paul Faulkner (Alessandro Nivola) in her search for the identity of her anonymous eye donor. That discovery leads Paul and Sydney to a trip to Mexico and a momentous meeting with the dead girl’s mother. Sydney’s vacation South of the Border is truly the weakest portion of the film and serves little purpose except to set up the big explosions in the finale.

The Eye gets a lot of its strength from the blurry vision that Sydney has to contend with after surgery. It is very disorienting to the audience and it makes the scary sights that much scarier when you can’t tell what the heck they are. The monsters are truly horrific looking but as actual threats to Sydney’s physical well-being, are about as threatening as a kitten’s hiss.

Unfortunately, there is little about The Eye that hasn’t been previously explored in far superior films such as The Sixth Sense or The Eyes of Laura Mars.

In the grand scheme of creepy movies, The Eye is not as powerful as The Others or The Ring, but a little more effective than Dark Water or The Grudge. It is a movie well served by the sound system of a movie theater, and I’m not sure if seeing it at home will have the same jolting effect.

The Eye is rated PG-13 for violence, horror and disturbing images. It is currently playing at Regal Cinemas in Boone.