Stephen Elliot Shows US How Not To Do Hitchcock (Eye Of The Beholder (DVD))

Member Name: wampyrii

Product:	Eye Of The Beholder (DVD)
Date:	18/12/01 (28 review reads)
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If Ewan McGregor were a racehorse we would have been gumming down envelopes with him right now, but as a crap Scottish actor we keep letting him carry on embarrassing the British acting profession. Here he is yet again in a movie which falls at the first and simplest of hurdles to leap...the one marked ?entertainment?. Even the dumbest of low budget movies can be ?entertaining? in some small way but McGregor seems to be a name you can use to distinguish whether a movie sucks or not without even reading the reviews. It is an uncanny knack he has for picking the awful and the bloody awful roles out there in movies which are a little smelly to say the least. He was OK in Trainspotting, but it was those around him who made the movie, and the genius of the work itself but that is how far back you need to go to find his one decent role...then you have the wooden performance in The Phantom Menace, that lame comedy thing with Cameron Diaz and now Eye Of The Beholder which attempts to be Hitchcockian...but comes across far too many hitches and has less cock than John-Wayne Bobbit.

Perhaps it is unfair to level all the criticism at Ewan McGregor because he of course had nothing to do with much of the mess of a movie which is displayed here for our cinematic delectation. Much of the blame for that can quite easily be laid upon screenwriter/director Stephen Elliot who has produced a piece of work which is impossible to like because it has a plot which is so full of holes as to treat its viewer as a blithering idiot in the expectation that they will be able to pull any kind of enjoyment out of it. Eye Of The Beholder has not only one of the most ludicrous premises you can imagine in a movie but also one of the most ludicrous and incompetent executions as well. It is little wonder that it hit the box office with all the resonance of pea striking the ocean and then sunk without a trace shortly afterwards. If you?re unlucky then you?ll have watched far too many movies rece
ntly and will have stumbled across it because there was little else to see in your video shop and this is what you will have been subjected to:

Ewan McGregor plays a James Bond figure(no sniggering, he does) codenamed ?Eye? because of his expertise with surveillance equipment. In fact, since his wife and daughter left him(because he was never there for them) he does little but ?live? in a small windowless office surrounded by his beloved equipment, having no contact with human beings other than his one contact in the secret service who talks to him via videophone. Now, all of this would point out to me that he was somewhat unstable and not exactly the kind of guy you?d want in the secret service, but obviously I would be far more insightful than the best this country has...yeah right. Anyway, our reclusive and obviously not particularly ?stable? ?Eye? gets assigned the task of spying on a young guy who is being blackmailed by a gorgeous woman into giving away official secrets. Instead however, he is witness to his charge?s murder at the hands of the blackmailer who turns out to be a serial killer with parental issues(Ashley Judd). Eye misses his daughter and talks to her all the time despite the fact that she isn?t there, whilst our killer has issues with her father abandoning her so erm...naturally this means the two get thrown together, Eye becoming obsessed by her, following her all over the US as she murders every guy she gets close to whilst he watches and covers up for her crimes...as you do. The more he involves himself, the more she feels that she is being dogged by someone and...

...and well nothing really, it all just builds up to a highly unsatisfactory payoff passing through some plot developments on the way which ask the viewer to make the most amazing leaps of faith...not that you would have expected anything else having suffered the previous hour and a half of tedium.

The movie?s biggest problem is in terms of its credibili
ty...it has none...and I do mean none anywhere throughout its entire running length. Firstly Eye?s motives for becomes instantly obsessed with killer Joanna are shall we say ?cloudy?. No lets just say crap, lets be perfectly honest, the motives this movie lays down for a secret service agent going AWOL between the ears are crap, nothing more, nothing less. Ludicrous isn?t the word for it - we are meant to believe that Eye is missing the daughter his wife took away from him and that he tries to protect the psychopathic Joanna in a ?fatherly? kind of way becoming completely obsessed by her en route. Now, no one can ever say that obsession is understandable because it isn?t, but that we are meant to swallow this line of reasoning is to treat us like morons. Romantic linkage in a fatherly protective sort of way...of course! Having just gagged on the last piece of nonsense we are force-fed another line of tripe because we are meant to believe that all this time the British secret service are more than happy to allow a rogue agent to run around North America without so much as an ?excuse me old chap, would you mind not aiding and abetting psychopaths there?s a good fellow? whilst twiddling their 1940?s spy moustaches. Eye is allowed to run free without hindrance which is blatant trousers and surely obvious to anyone watching as being such. These are two rather large problems, but sadly they are not the only ones, but instead the largest of many, many more because this movie has more holes and than gouda cheese and leaves so much unexplained that you?re left pulling your hair out in frustration.

Based on such weak foundations it would have taken a monumental effort for its cast to have salvaged something at all from the wreckage but they either do not try or simply do not have the talent to do so. I think I would err with the latter judging by their past ?achievements? in the movie world. Ewan McGregor is given little to actually work with here considering his is
the main character but even so his performance exudes all the charisma of the common house brick. He completely fails to connect with the audience in any way, shape or form and as a result you as a watcher are left unable to understand either his motivations or even give two hoots about what happens to him or what he is doing. Admittedly, the screenplay gives you no indication as to Eye?s character, no depth to his personality or anything else which may have helped McGregor pull something reasonable off here with such things as ?I have a missing daughter? meant to define his character for us all...ermm, ?scuse me if I don?t get it. Ashley Judd?s character is not handled much better - she kills people, says ?Merry Christmas daddy? a lot and that?s her characterisation done. When you consider that Stephen Elliot is the man responsible for Priscilla Queen Of The Desert with all its wonderful, colourful characters, you might be forgiven for thinking that he might recognise the benefits of good characterisation in appealing to an audience. maybe that movie was a fluke, or that side of things had nothing to do with him, but it seems that he learnt nothing from the experience. Judd?s character is as flat, dull and one-dimensional as McGregor?s and although her acting performance injects a little life into it, all she is really asked to do is keep switching wigs and look pretty so you can?t say she manages to achieve anything more than a faint blip on the heart monitor. If either of these two were hospital patients someone would have been calling for a priest halfway through the movie.

But hey, it gets worse on the acting front...or the miscasting front anyway. Firstly we inexplicably have pop singer and lesbian icon k. d. Lang playing Eye?s contact in the secret service who is quite frankly hilariously bad every time she comes on screen. Then you have the next stroke of casting catastrophe in the form of Jason Priestly(of Beverly Hills 90210 fame) as a pimp/rapi
st/junkie...oh please, the Christmas fairy would make a more sleazy, menacing character than Jason Priestly!

You may as well forget everything else...it looks OK, the camerawork is fine, soundtrack all right blah, blah, but who cares when frankly the movie sucks? It would have taken a monumental moment of genius to have created a finale which could have salvaged anything from this movie but no one watching would have expected anything more than the unbelievably poor one you actually get. Most of the time when a movie leaves you ?dangling? its damn annoying but sometimes it works. When the movies sucks all the way through then its the final kick in the funbags which leaves you spitting blood and venom and wanting a certain director?s uncreative head on a rather sharp pole.

Eye of the Beholder is an awful movie in too many respects to allow any appreciation of the things which are good about it. That a major studio commissioned it and then deemed it fit for a (whimpery) cinema release is amazing in itself, but that its turn out to be this bad, almost insultingly so, leaves me quite incredulous. Films about obsession have been done before and have usually been rather good, but then films such as Damage, to name one, have depended upon a strong screenplayer and some powerful performances from a seasoned cast to acheive their desired effects. The screenplay here is as ill-conceived as they come and none of the cast is going to make anything other than the Hollywood B-list at best so you end up with a lifeless lump of dead reel. This marked Ashley Judd?s second duff thriller in a row and this is one reviewer at least who will be avoiding her next one because I have never believed in third time lucky . As to Mr. McGregor...someone find the boy a job eh? Farm hand would be a good start...he has plenty of experience with shovelling sh*t...

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