The Eye (2008)

O Masterpiece
O Excellent
O Rental
O OK
X Mediocrity
O Avoid

Review by Jason Pyles / February 5, 2008

I once worked at “Wylie Eye & Dental,” a family business where the wife is an optometrist and the husband a dentist. Cute, huh? All incoming calls to the office had to be directed to the appropriate department. But for some reason, when patients called in for an optometry appointment, an alarming percentage of them would ask, “Can I talk to ‘The Eye?’”

Yes, inexplicably, they’d ask for “The Eye,” as if we had some big, pulsating, vein-protruding, all-seeing eyeball behind a blue-velvet curtain, always asking for its slippers and cigarettes, waiting to receive phone calls. Funny, none of the dental patients (who were presumably the same people) ever asked for “The Tooth.” Go figure.

Needless to say, it was difficult to shake the thought that I was going to review a movie about my old boss, “The Eye.” If only … it surely would have been cleverer than this remake.

That’s right; “The Eye” stars Jessica Alba and is a remake of a Chinese film by the same name. It’s even funnier to me that this movie is called “The Eye,” singular, when it’s actually about two eyeballs, plural. OK, well, which eye?

Sweet, sweet Sydney Wells (Jessica Alba) is blind and has been since she was five years old. Over the past 15 years or so, she’s adapted quite well to her disability, and “The Eye” demonstrates this by resorting to the overdone cliché where the blind person saves the seeing person from getting hit by a bus.

But there’s good news: Sydney is getting cornea transplants from an unnamed donor, a surgery which should restore her sight. There is, however, a problem. Her donor’s eyes have seen (and continue to see) very unpleasant things, which evokes frightening experiences for the newly seeing Sydney.

You get the idea. “The Eye” is not scary, but it supplies at least two really good jumps, though they’re those cheap Gotcha! moments. “The Eye” is like a broken record, because its plot developments keep replaying the same events in the same sequences to the point that it’s tiresome. Oh, and there’s one scene that’s not supposed to be funny, but I laughed out loud. It’s supposed to be very dramatic, where something bad happens to Sydney, but it’s ridiculous.

If I’m not mistaken, “The Eye” is one of Alba’s first films that she has been entrusted to carry alone with her own name. I commend her for taking a role where she doesn’t look glamorous at every moment; though, the frosty-glass shower scene to “throw the lusty males some PG-13 crumbs” was insulting. Despite that, I was most impressed with the various treatments that she underwent to get her eyes to look as they do, barring that wasn’t all digitally inserted.

My best friend, Bill Barnes, is also an optometrist. (I’m up to my eyeball, singular, in O.D. friends.) When he attended optometry school, he’d get to enjoy a fancy dance called “The Eye Ball.” Get it? Eyeball? Yeah, undeniably corny, but even that’s cleverer than “The Eye.” In short, “The Eye” isn’t worth your time or your money: Visit the dentist, instead.

Note: If you’d like to see a very good thriller about a blind woman, then I recommend “Wait Until Dark” (1967), with Audrey Hepburn.

Directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud
Jessica Alba / Alessandro Nivola / Parker Posey
Thriller 97 min.
MPAA: PG-13 (for violence/terror and disturbing content)

U.S. Release Date: February 1, 2008
Copyright 2008: 233