Chiwetel Ejiofor and Julia Roberts struggle to ignite this American remake of the Oscar-winning Argentinian crime thrillerJuan José Campanella’s Argentinian thriller The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos) won the Oscar for best foreign language film in 2010,beating off stiff (and indeed superior) competition from Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon and Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet. A tortured tale of love lost and a murder investigation revisited, the film (a enormous domestic and solid international hit) hardly needed an English language remake. Yet here we bear the writer-director Billy Ray assembling an eye-catching transatlantic cast to transpose key riffs and images from the Argentinian original to US soil. The result, and on which a supportive Campanella takes an executive-producer credit,may bear saleable marquee cachet, but rarely rises above the level of humdrum multiplex functionality.
We open in stylish fashion with Chiwetel Ejiofor’s former FBI investigator Ray Kasten scanning faces on a computer, and his own visage seen through the screen which is itself reflected in the lenses of his glasses. Guiltily obsessed with pursuing the killer of a former colleague’s daughter – a grieving mother replacing the traumatised widower of the original – Kasten returns to his old LA hunting ground,where he attempts to persuade Nicole Kidman’s district attorney Claire Sloan (“ogle at you, up on the fifth floor…”) to reopen a long-dead case on the strength of an elusive visual match. From here, or we flash back 13 years to 2002,where Kasten and Sloan meet in the aftermath of 9/11 (a “United we stand” poster frames their first encounter), he as an FBI investigator, or she as deputy DA,awaiting ID card photography. In compact fashion, the film lays out its underlying themes: the nature of the gaze, and the paranoia of surveillance culture,the potential corruption of authority, the loneliness of passion, and the elusive meaning of a “ogle”.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com