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Eye of the Beholder
1/2
Rated on a 4-star
scale
Screening venue: Odeon (Bromborough)
Released in the UK by Metrodome on June 9, 2000; certificate 18; 109 minutes;
country of origin USA; aspect ratio 2.35:1
Directed by Stephan Elliot; produced by
Stephan Elliot.
Written by Stephan Elliot; based on the novel by Marc Behm.
Photographed by Guy Dufaux; edited by Sue
Blainey.
CAST.....
Ewan McGregor..... The Eye
Ashley Judd..... Joanna
Jason Priestley..... Gary
k.d. lang..... Hilary
Patrick Bergin..... Alex Leonard
"Eye of the Beholder" is flat, lifeless
crap. If you see and like it, then never read a movie review again: there's
no need, since you will enjoy every picture you see. This one starts to sink
during the opening titles. Its name doesn't even appear onscreen, just a
close-up of an actor's eye, and the words "of the Beholder". Text scrolls
across the screen miserably, as if it had been created by a cheap video-titler
from the Argos catalogue.
Ewan McGregor stars as (I think) a cop assigned
to track down a rich man's son who has committed fraud. The kid is murdered
by a mysterious woman played by Ashley Judd, who plans the event mercilessly
but for some reason starts crying immediately afterwards. Even though he
has everything recorded on videotape, McGregor does not arrest her, but instead
creeps around the crime scene in the dark, so as not to be seen, as if he
had something to hide. He doesn't, but is a true weirdo, what with his
visions of his long-lost daughter that he actually argues with and buys gifts
for.
McGregor becomes obsessed with Judd, and the movie
consists of a lot of scenes with very little dialogue, with her carefully
seducing and killing men (and crying each time), and he following her across
America, glaring pointlessly and getting very fat and dirty. At the end of
the film, there are parallels revealed between these two characters, but
these only exist because of all the bizarre, contrived situations the movie
sets up, and who could care about them anyway, when the people involved are
such freaks? McGregor is an obsessive nut with no personality, and Judd is
a murderous chameleon whose sincerity is constantly in doubt.
The film is teeming with bewildering nonsense.
Throughout, McGregor is standing about six feet away from Judd with highly
conspicuous pieces of technology, and she doesn't notice him once. Even when
someone tells her she's being stalked, she only gets suspicious for one scene,
and she looks for her pursuer in front of her! The script features
a lot of high-tech gadgets, but the production designer equips them with
chunky text fonts and ridiculous colours that make them look like props from
"Naked Gun" movies. Huge plot points are brought up and then forgotten about:
Judd has a miscarriage she weeps about then recovers from straight away;
a heroin addict beats, rapes and injects her, but she doesn't suffer any
bruising or drug sickness; in one scene McGregor discovers that she was brought
up in an orphanage that trains girls to be psychotic robots, and then this
is never mentioned in the dialogue again.
There is more. Much more. The filmmakers get a
lot into 118 minutes, but for all the jam-packing, somehow the pace is not
quickened, and just plods along interminably, as we shake our watches to
make sure they're not broken. We get excited at the end of every scene, in
the hope that the screen will fade to black and we can go home. All the actors,
even the supporting performers, look sullen, and speak in slow, miserable,
creepy voices. My guess is that they're tired: they probably slept on the
set, because if they'd gone home they wouldn't have been able to make themselves
come back. The author of the source material also wrote the Beatles movie
"Help!" That title will no doubt become the "Eye of the Beholder" audience
motto.
COPYRIGHT© 2000 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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