Movie Review: The Eye

Thursday, February 14, 2008

In the past three years, Jessica Alba has starred in snoozers like Fantastic Four, Into The Blue and Good Luck Chuck. But it’s not bad acting that ruins her movies. It’s her MTV body, which attracts profit-obsessed studios that want movies with sex appeal and non-stop action at the expense of good old-fashion storytelling.

In The Eye, an adaptation of a Chinese film released in 2002, Alba’s character, Sydney, gets a cornea transplant that grants her sight, but at a lofty price: She sees dead people (gasp!). Of course, it takes a while for her doctor (Alessandro Nivola, who looks like a not-so-buff Dr. Kevin Lenihan) to buy her story, but when he finally comes around they venture to Mexico to uncover the mystery of her donor.

To say that what they find is anti-climactic gives the movie too much credit, for it implies that sufficient suspense was built up during the course of the movie so that a disappointing ending was even possible. Co-directors David Morneau and Xavier Palud’s idea of rising action is a cheap shriek every five minutes with a Jessica Alba shower scene thrown somewhere in the middle. It’s sound-bite-era horror, The Sixth Sense for teenyboppers on Ritalin.

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