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ANGEL
EYES
2/10
USA
2001
director
: Luis Mandoki
script : Gerald DiPego
cinematography : Piotr Sobocinski
editing : Jerry Greenberg
music : Marco Beltrami
lead actors : Jennifer Lopez, Jim Caviezel, Sonia Braga, Shirley Knight
104 minutes
The
good fairy gave J.Lo. drop-dead looks and made sure she could sing like
Madonna, if Madonna could sing properly, and also dance and act pretty
well. But the bad fairy had a trump card up her sleeve, and gave the lass
truly lousy movie judgement. Angel Eyes is her third dumb-ass strike-out
in a row, and it’s the worst of the lot: while The
Cell was just a silly bit of sci-fi nonsense, and Wedding
Planner a similarly daft bit of old-fashioned romantic-comedy
fluff, Angel Eyes demands – amazingly - to be taken seriously.
It deals with adult themes of family dysfunction, loneliness and grief,
but handles them with such sloppy idiocy that its sombre portentousness
just ends up making it all the more laughable.
And
what kind of film is this exactly? It’s not much of a romance, as there’s
zero credibility or chemistry in the relationship that develops between
Lopez’s Sharon, a tough Chicago cop, and Caviezel’s Catch (“just Catch”)
the drifter who appears from nowhere to save her life, then refuses to
divulge anything of his identity or his past. There are some mild supernatural
overtones - the title and Caviezel’s zonked-out loopiness hint at some
kind of celestial goings-on - but these are wildly misleading. And, despite
all the gun-play and cop stuff, it isn’t much of a thriller. By the end,
when Caviezel has finally spilled the beans, the “plot” emerges as a ludicrous
series of contrivances and coincidences requiring a superhuman suspension
of disbelief.
It
isn’t really the actors’ fault – Lopez sails through it all with what
is, under the circumstances, an admirable professionalism, and, in supporting
roles, veterans Braga and Knight contribute some entirely undeserved touches
of class. But Caviezel is a trickier proposition. This kind of saintly-mystic
schtick worked just fine in the hands of Terrence Malick in The Thin
Red Line, where the film adopted his character’s holy-goof view of
the world, and nobody knew anything about Caviezel. Perhaps this was an
intriguingly strong new acting presence. Perhaps not, as it’s turned out.
After the atrocious Pay
It Forward – where he again played a scruffy bum-type - and
now this, it’s clear that he’s very much dependent on his material and
his director.
He
was appealingly gloomy in Frequency,
where he was wisely kept on the go by the intricate plot mechanics, but
his strongest post-Malick performance is his least well-known and least
typical, the gloweringly charismatic Black John from Ang Lee’s under-released
Ride with the Devil. He’d be well advised to seek out action roles
in future: a little of him goes a very long way here. He grinds out his
lines in a lobotomised monotone: “I’m circling awhile,” he says on his
first visit to Lopez’s apartment, and his tortuous pronouncements recall
the Fawlty Towers guest played by Bernard Cribbins, who drove Basil
to ask “Why don’t you talk properly?”
Catch
doesn’t talk properly because the scriptwriter can’t write a script. The
film keeps building to major revelations or emotional peaks, only to sabotage
them with some jaw-droppingly awful lines and bits of dopey business,
as when, on a visit to a jazz club, Catch ambles on-stage and starts an
impromptu trumpet rendition of a smoky blues number. Later, overcome with
emotion at a graveside, he goes off an a crazy tangent as he talks of
how he worked out on a calculator the number of minutes he’d been alive
up to a certain fateful event. Then we flash back to this event, which
gives ‘Catch’ his name, and what’s supposed to be tragedy plays more like
a morbid kind of slapstick. While the hapless Caviezel has to shoulder
the burden of the script’s inadequacies, even Lopez isn’t immune. A tearful
memory of her abusive father is torpedoed when she recalls him “a-growlin’
an’ a-beepin’” as he impersonated an alien invader.
Exceedingly
charitable audiences may just succumb to the lachrymose soppiness of it
all, and overlook Mandoki’s over-woozy camera or the stunning awfulness
of his gauzy final freeze-frame. The film-makers presumably hoped that
the magic word ‘romance’ would somehow paper over their shortcomings.
But there’s no excuse for some of these lapses. Nobody seems sure exactly
when a pivotal car crash took place: it’s referred to as ‘that night,’
but when we finally see it play out, in black-and-white flashback, it’s
clearly day-time. Equally clear in the background is the familiar outline
of the CN tower – like many US films, Angel Eyes uses Toronto as
a stand-in, but most of them are careful to avoid getting Canada’s only
world-famous landmark structure in shot.
At
one point Catch remarks, musing about love, “Some people give off a particular
odour.” As Angel Eyes reminds us, so do some movies.
4th
September, 2001
(seen Aug-28-01, Warner Village, Newcastle)
For the many
other films as bad as this (and worse) check out our Diorama
of Dishonour
alternatively
check these out (kind-of-magical romances)
1 The Princess and the Warrior
2 Moulin Rouge
3 Judy Berlin
by Neil
Young
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