`Eye’ painfully dull, inept film to behold

In theaters

EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then so is trash, which is precisely what one beholds for nearly two hours during Stephan Elliott’s painfully dull, inept and ridiculous thriller “Eye of the Beholder.”

The film has all the vision of a blinded Cyclops, all the flash of a burlap bag, all the cool sophistication of a worn-out femme fatale.

It’s a pillaging Hun that references a wealth of other films, including Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and “Rear Window,” Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation,” Powell’s “Peeping Tom,” Brian De Palma’s “Obsession” and Luc Besson’s “La Femme Nikita.”

But a crime has been committed here and that crime, as far as audiences are concerned, is dire: Elliott completely misses what made these other films work –a strong, literate script charged with interesting, fully developed and believable characters.

Unfortunately, nothing in “Beholder” is interesting, nothing is developed, nothing is believable. As directed by Elliott, whose 1994, Academy Award-winning “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” was a knockout, “Beholder” is an utter failure, a film that confounds from start to finish with its muddled script and sheer lack of understanding of what works in a thriller — and what doesn’t.

The film stars Ashley Judd as Joanna Eris, a wig-wearing psycho who murders her lovers for reasons that are never once made clear. Did they somehow cross her? Were they bad in bed? Did they criticize her wigs? Who can say why she kills — certainly not The Eye (Ewan McGregor), a British intelligence agent who literally lives in a belfry and who goes all doe-eyed over Joanna after he witnesses her stabbing her boyfriend to death.

Indeed, instead of exploring who Joanna is or why The Eye falls madly in love with her, the film is more interested in what Joanna wears, what glamorous city The Eye follows her to, what cliche the script can haul out next.

With k.d. lang on board in a silly, wooden performance as The Eye’s silly, wooden adviser, “Eye of the Beholder” is as lackluster as milquetoast, a dull, myopic waste of time that blatantly steals its audience’s cash and never should have been beheld at all.

Grade: F

On video

THE ASTRONAUT’S WIFE

Rand Ravich’s “The Astronaut’s Wife” is one small step in Ravich’s career, and one giant leap backward for the psychological drama. It dares to go where few films have gone before — absolutely nowhere.

The film stars Johnny Depp as Spencer Armacost, a NASA astronaut who loses two minutes of consciousness while on a mission in space. It’s what happened to Spencer — and to his dumb astronaut buddy, Alex (Nick Cassavetes) — that’s supposedly at the core of this film.

But the film’s script is full of black holes. Because the story is first about the great love supposedly shared between Spencer and his wife, Jillian (Charlize Theron), it’s absolutely essential that we believe in their love. Only then will we care when it’s threatened by extraterrestrial events.

But there’s no chemistry between the actors, no life in their bones. Ravich saturates his film in such cold, steely blues, Depp and Theron become two blocks of ice sliding about on the screen. Indeed, each time they hit the sack, which is often, one half expects some cash to be left on a bedside table.

Worse is Depp’s performance. Why Ravich insisted on having the actor speak in a slow, dim-witted Southern drawl is beyond comprehension; throughout, he sounds less like a bright, wealthy astronaut responsible for billions of dollars in technology than a man selling sides of pork out of a backwoods trailer.

Theron holds up better, but that’s only because she delivered the exact same performance in 1997’s “The Devil’s Advocate.”

Unlike M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense,” which hits video stores March 28, “Wife” isn’t a sustained piece of work. It has learned nothing from the canon, certainly nothing from the genre itself, because it exists in a sort of vacuum. Sure, the sets are terrific, but it’s cheaper and more satisfying to purchase an issue of Metropolitan Home.

In the end, it comes down to the characters — it always does — and Ravich’s characters are dead on the screen, cadavers with moving mouths and watery eyes who have no connection to themselves, to the story or to the audience.

Let’s send them — and this rotten film — straight to the moon.

Grade: D-

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews are available each Monday and Thursday in the NEWS, each Tuesday and Thursday on WLBZ’s “NEWS CENTER 5:30 Today” and “NEWS CENTER Tonight,” and each Saturday and Sunday on NEWS CENTER’s statewide “Morning Report.”