Angel Eyes (2001)

Decent Drama, But is That What You were Expecting?

Huh? What's going on? I feel like I got blindsided by a slow moving bus.

What kind of movie does Angel Eyes seem like to you? Did you see the trailer? How about how the movie starts? At the scene of a horrific vehicular accident, we see policewoman Sharon (Jennifer Lopez) through the eyes of one of the accident victims. She's frantically trying to get the victim to hang in there as the victim slips into and out of consciousness. As the last lapse of unconsciousness begins to take hold, the image of Sharon's face begins to fade out; the eyes are the last image we see as the screen goes white.

It's now a year later and Sharon is seen as a tough-on-the-outside, uncertain-on-the-inside woman, still a police officer on the beat. She lives alone, can't sleep, and her social life consists of hanging out with her cop buddies. We watch her as she arrests lowlife troublemakers, and we learn about her estrangement from her father. During a rather exciting sequence, she and her policemen friends are ambushed in a drive-by shooting. She and her partner chase down the attackers. At a moment when her life would have surely ended, she is saved by a mysterious stranger (James Caviezel).

The stranger, it seems, has been spending his time doing good deeds. Sharon has caught his eye, and he is now interested in getting to know her better. She tries to learn as much as she can about about him, but her questioning lead nowhere. The man has no past and the one-word name he gives for himself, "Catch," brings up no record of existence. As the movie goes on, Sharon is determined to delve deeper and begins to fall in love as well.

So I'll ask again: what kind of movie does Angel Eyes seem like? The set-up seems to indicate that we're starting down the road to a mysterious thriller. Who is Catch? Does he have a secret past? Is he possibly, as the title of the movie may suggest, an angel? These are the questions we are lead to ask ourselves after we've seen its trailer and after the movie has gotten well past its first half-hour. My warning to you, the potential viewer, is: don't be fooled. This movie is not a thriller.

I would be potentially be more upset at the apparent bait-and-switch tactic pulled off by the marketers of this movie if it weren't for the fact that the movie is actually decent as what it really is: a melodramatic love story about people who must learn to face their pasts before they can get on with their futures. I am more upset for the audience members who were obviously expecting something more exciting and getting something comparatively mundane. It's a slow movie; director Luis Mandoki of When a Man Loves a Woman gives it a pace fitting of its dramatic content, although viewers may be lead to believe that the movie is Shyamalan-like and therefore may also be waiting for that patented twist ending.

Well, there's no twist ending here. Let me do the movie-makers a favor here and give the film a true advertisement. Angel Eyes is not a mystery cop-thriller. It's a human drama about lonely people who have pasts to face and overcome. Seen that way, the film isn't bad at all and it addresses realistic human concerns and situations. However, more than likely, viewers are going to feel pretty cheated if they walked in hoping to bite their nails and then left realizing they should've brought a hanky instead.

Rating: 6/10

©Jeffrey Chen, May 18, 2001

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