Angel Eyes

ANGEL EYES

Rating: C-

Jennifer Lopez plays a Chicago cop with a troubled home life. James Caviezel plays a mysterious stranger whom Lopez ministers to in a serious car wreck in the opening scene. Then, one year later, Caviezel appears out of nowhere to save Lopez's life from a gun-wielding thug. Is he or isn't he? Dead, that is.

Caviezel goes through the entire film looking like he was up too late the night before. This becomes annoying, particularly because he delivers his lines like he's stoned. In most of the scenes he also has a two-day growth of stubble, which made me wonder how they accomplished this effect so consistently. I mean, I doubt they shot the entire movie in one day. (I don't doubt they wrote the entire script in one day.) Maybe they only filmed on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays?

Because this is ostensibly a romance, we're forced to endure pensive piano tinklings on the sound track, messages of longing and regret left on answering machines (while the recipient sits morosely in the room), dumb dialogue which tries to sound clever, and basically every other romance cliché guaranteed to make you retch. This might have been more bearable had there been something else going on (that something else being commonly referred to as a "plot"). Instead, we're forced to content ourselves with the piano tinklings. I was desperately hoping someone somewhere would say "I see dead people" just to liven things up a bit, but it never happens.

There's a screenwriter's bugaboo known as "static conflict" - where the main conflict in the story remains the same scene after scene without developing or intensifying. If you were ever unfortunate enough to endure The Age of Innocence, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Static conflict invariably leads to a very boring movie, and if Angel Eyes is anything, it's a very boring movie. Anyone who read this script with at least one eye open should have spotted this problem from a mile away. That this project ever got greenlighted is a testimony to just how inept portions of the Hollywood system can be.

I defy anyone to point out a "climax" in this film. As a matter of fact, don't feel there's something wrong with you if it seems like the final scenes are from a different movie entirely - we're not viewing the work of rocket scientists here, after all. My personal favorite is the long, tearful monologue Caviezel delivers to a gravestone. I kept thinking it would have been neat to have the gravestone start talking back in a shot/reverse shot dialogue. The filmmakers probably didn't go for it because they were afraid the stone would out-act Caviezel.