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Eye See You is (in addition to a wholly retarded movie title) one of the most schizophrenic flicks I’ve ever seen. At various points, the movie feels like a police thriller, a murder mystery, a drama about overcoming alcoholism, and (most clearly) a snow-bound slasher flick. (The only thing this movie doesn’t try to be is a comedy, yet ironically that’s precisely what it is.) If that description sounds like some sort of B-movie bouillabaisse fun… well, that’s what I thought too. Before I actually watched the thing.

Sly plays an FBI agent tracking a cop killer. In the course of one day, two cop friends and his adorable girlfriend are savaged. After a brief chase, we flash to… 3 months later. (Apparently the killer got away.) Sly is now a pathetic drunkard, so a cop pal (Charles Dutton, presenting a wholly moronic subplot) signs him up for a rather…untraditional sort of detoxification. And that’s when the movie goes from merely familiar to wholly uproarious.

The detox clinic is a gigantic old military asylum (yes, I said military asylum) out in the middle of America’s most desolate ice storm. The clinic is run by an ex-cop and it only services…cops who are alcoholic. (In order to clearly illustrate this moronic conceit, we get one FBI agent, one DEA, one Scotland Yarder, one Canadian Mountie, etc., etc., - and I state for the record: I’m not making this stuff up.) So we got Ten Little Indians meets Friday the 13th by way of Clean and Sober, filmed on the set of John Carpenter’s The Thing and loaded with actors you’re most likely to find on the next inevitable incarnation of The Love Boat. Again, I think my descriptions make the movie sound like fun – when in truth you’d have a better time picking scabs off of a small child with chicken pox.

Scenes fade out mid-conversation, others start in the middle of the action, characters change motivations and personalities with nary a hiccup, plot threads are jettisoned without provocation, and the dialogue ranges from merely banal to outright wretched. The movie is uninteresting in a visual sense (despite Dean Semler’s swanky snow photography), entirely familiar in its narrative, stunningly ugly in several scenes and astoundingly slow throughout. Since the screenplay is the most unintentionally amusing aspect among hundreds of unintentionally amusing factors, I’ll share one scene with you that I think sums Eye See You perfectly:

Cop: How are the fish biting?

Bumpkin: It's the dead of winter!

Cop: I meant ice fishing…

Bumpkin: Fact is, you couldn't pick a better time of year.

That’s it; that’s the whole scene. Join me when I say “Huh?” (In the DVD supplements, Charles Dutton calls his character ‘the comic relief’, though the guy doesn’t offer one moment of humor or levity in the entire flick; further proof that bad movies are made even worse by inept editing.)

This is the kind of movie in which dead bodies pop up every twelve minutes, and the one who discovers each dead corpse is required to speak the victim’s name aloud. (Sly moans “Jack! (gasp) Oh no, JACK!” while corpse #5 swings by on a noose.) This technique is used because A) we have no idea who these people are, and B) each spoken word of dialogue brings us a step closer to the end credits. The acting performances are (despite the proliferation of solid performers like Jeffrey Wright, Robert Patrick, Courtney B. Vance, and Stephen Lang) uniformly bland and delivered with disinterest.

Second feature by director Jim Gillespie, this one makes his debut effort (the anemic I Know What You Did Last Summer) seem like high art by comparison. I’ve seen more than my share of ‘unreleased junk’ that still manages to entertain; not all direct-to-video movies are cinematic detritus. But when you rent a studio-backed flick that’s been through 7 canceled release dates and 3 alternate titles, odds are you’re about to rent something truly bad.

Lots of schlock can be labeled ‘so bad they’re good’. "Eye See You" is so bad it’s almost mystical. Direct-to-video is too good for this one; it should have gone Direct-to-3 AM Local Access.

link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=1778&reviewer=128
originally posted: 04/30/04 19:21:44
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