Luis Mandoki’s ANGEL EYES [2/10]

Published on: September 4th, 2001

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 its 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? Its 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 shtick 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 also played a scruffy bum-type) and now this, its 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, its 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.” Indeed, as Angel Eyes reminds us, so do some movies.

Neil Young
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


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